Book review: 'After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul'

Sir Jonathan Ive and Tim Cook. (Jony Ive photo credit: Marcus Dawes via Wikimgedia Commons CC 3.0; Tim Cook image: Book Kraft CC 4.0)

There’s a ritual many Apple fanboys (me included) indulge in - a visit to an Apple Store in almost every city they visit across the world. If the iPhone or the Apple Watch highlight Apple’s perfect blend of cutting-edge hardware and intuitive user experience, the stores are the ultimate window to the soul of the brand.

I’ve been amazed how the retail experience is consistent whether I was at my favourite Apple Store – the iconic 6^th Avenue store in Manhattan, or Osaka or Zurich. The staff speak the same language and live the brand like no other retail team. Each time I’m at these stores, I have this urge to go behind the scenes and get a peek into what makes Apple tick, it’s not dissimilar to wanting to go backstage after you’ve just seen your favourite rock band perform live.

Tripp Mickle’s latest book attempts to do just that.

“He’s irreplaceable, they will not be nearly so successful, because he’s gone.”

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Steve Jobs’ close friends, predicted the company was doomed after the death of Apple’s talismanic CEO. He compared his demise to Jobs’ departure from Apple in the 1980s which left the company groping for direction.

Larry Ellison was not alone. From Wall Street to Main Street, almost everyone was apprehensive. None of these doubters could have predicted Apple’s meteoric rise through the 2010s as it became a trillion-dollar company. Tripp Mickle charts this incredible success story through the contributions and impact of two key players, the protagonists of his book – Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

Tripp Mickle covered Apple for four years at the Wall Street Journal, and the book is the result of five years of first-hand reporting and interviews with more than 200 current and former Apple employees (on the condition that he doesn’t identify them as sources). Apple’s employees are sworn to secrecy in a culture that reiterates that this secrecy is critical for the company’s revenues and shareholder value.

The book starts with an account on the special relationship that Steve Jobs shared with Ive. We all remember the famous phone call Jobs made to Ive during the launch of the iPhone in 2007. That call drew parallels with the first ever phone call between Graham Bell and Thomas Watson more than a century ago. Mickle compares the Jobs-Ive relationship to the Paul McCartney-John Lennon partnership - the more cynical John Lennon and the more sentimental Paul McCartney. “Whereas Jobs was voluble, direct, and insistent, Ive was quiet, steady, and patient.” Fun fact: Apple was named after Apple Records, the Beatles record label. Steve Jobs was a big fan of the band.

The power of Apple’s design team is summed up in their simple credo, “Don’t disappoint the gods”. Jobs’ elevation of Ive meant that the studio-led product development and engineers worked to fulfil its demands. Designers defined how a product would look and had an outsize voice in its functions.

The development of the Apple Watch is covered in great detail in the book. In many ways this was Ive’s passion project through much of the 2010s and a challenge for Apple to build a whole new category after the baton passed from Steve Jobs. The iPod, iPhone and iPad were all launched during the Jobs era, the Apple Watch was positioned as the ‘next big thing’.

The Apple Watch project demonstrates Ive’s passion for finer details. The team spent countless hours arriving at the design for the crown and the leather for the straps was flown from some of Europe’s oldest tanneries.

Tripp Mickle introduces Tim Cook as the detail-oriented executive who was drafted by Jobs to rejig Apple’s then-inefficient production line. There’s a famous meeting where one of his staff members presented a plan to increase inventory turnover from 25 times a year to 100 to save money on “spoiling parts”. Cook calmly asked, “How would you get to a thousand?”

Mickle contrasts Cook with Ive using comparative sketches of their early career when Ive drove to work in a canary yellow Saab while Cook preferred his staid Honda Accord.

The book builds a detailed picture about how Apple transitions from the company built on Ive’s design successes and his partnership with Jobs in the 2000s to the company driven by Cook’s leadership style in the 2010s. From the Apple car project to Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company as it expanded its footprint in China and handled the transition from the Obama to Trump presidency. It also paints a picture of Ive’s relationship with the company he helped build, from his part-time stint to the big moment in 2019 when he left the company to start his own design firm LoveFrom.

Mickle sums up that the dissolution of the Ive-Cook partnership was inevitable. “The two men shared a love of Apple but little else. As Apple swelled in size alongside the iPhone’s explosive growth, Cook began to change the fabric of the company out of necessity to manage its increased scale. At his direction, Apple expanded the number of products it made, scrutinised the money it spent, and shifted its focus from hardware to services. The strands connecting Cook and Ive frayed.”

The Apple Watch, which dominates much of this book, wasn’t the Next Big Thing after the iPhone. Will there be a next big thing or will services continue to be Apple’s big sales driver in the years to come? That could well be the theme for Tripp Mickel’s next book that charts the Apple journey in a post-Jony Ive era.