The most recommended books about Apple Inc.

In 2010, I became aware of appalling news stories about multiple suicides at the giant factory complexes in South China which churn out high-spec Apple devices. Shortly afterwards, a team of researchers went into the field to find out exactly what was happening at Foxconn, the vast multinational at the heart of this transpacific electronics supply chain.

On the one hand, the story they uncovered is about a predatory labor regime which relies on sweatshop brutality to get results. On the other, the authors document the vibrant cultural life that Foxconn factory workers have developed in order to survive and protest: poems, songs, open letters, photos, and videos.

As it exposes the murky origins of shiny gadgets, the book also spoke to me as a testament to the power and potential of committed activist scholarship.

As suggested by my recommendation of Levy’s Facebook, I’m a sucker for a big book about tech entrepreneurs, especially when the subject is as prickly and culturally relevant as Steve Jobs (the book also inspired Aaron Sorkin’s post-Social Network screenplay for 2015’s Steve Jobs, another great Silicon Valley film).

While I’m not an Apple fanboy, I am a fan of Pixar, the other company for which Jobs was CEO. Isaacson’s biography in turn offers a fast-paced history of the way computers and computing, via Apple’s designs and Pixar’s films, stopped being objects only for offices and science fiction, and became part of our everyday landscape.

Like him or not, we’re all partly living in Steve Jobs’ world.

Apple is the most secretive commercial company I know.  Most books that have been written about them are about their colorful co-founder Steve Jobs, and much less about the inner workings.  My favorite book on how the actual work of product is done at Apple is Creative Selection by former engineering lead Ken Kocienda. Ken worked on some of the company’s most important products and technologies, during what I’d consider the peak innovation period for the company (so far).  Because Ken is an engineer, this book provides the engineering perspective, but the book is loaded with useful observations, learnings and insights.

I read this book after I had read many others about Apple, but if I could do it over again, I would start here. This is the single best book about Apple’s early history from its founding in 1976 until the release of the Macintosh in 1984. When I’m learning something, I always find it valuable to start from the beginning. You’ll need more than just this book though because the material in it covering post-1984 Apple is cursory at best.

I write about how our brain wires itself from experience, so it was fascinating to examine Steve Jobs's well-known story in that way. The book shows how each of his steps was built on the experiences that came before.

I loved the way the book manages to invoke the drama and suspense of the huge risks he took. Even though we know how the story turns out, the book really helped me understand how stressful things were while they were happening. Steve already had cancer when he developed the iPhone, but he kept pushing.

I appreciated the book’s even-handedness. It neither deifies him nor attacks him. It is rooted in interviews with many people who knew him, so you get a variety of perspectives. 

I feel like it would be crazy to not read a book by a cofounder when you want to learn about the history of a company. Steve Wozniak’s autobiography chiefly focuses on his early life and his years at Apple. The writing style is very basic—with a quite simple sentence structure throughout. Perhaps that’s because this book was positioned to be attractive to both children and adults. But this is the only book written by one of Apple’s cofounders and iWoz has a very positive, inspirational message.

This was one of the first Apple history books that I read when I was a teenager. It primarily covers vignettes from the early years and the non-Jobs era of Apple (1985–1997). I read the first edition, which came out in 1999. It’s valuable because most Apple books tend to concentrate on the Jobs era. I have not read the newer, 2004 edition.