"Levy, a senior editor and the chief technology correspondent at Newsweek, uses the success of the device to trace Apple’s dramatic if familiar story arc, from Jobs’s ouster from the company to his return in the late ’90s and his profitable embrace of the digital music market..."
@ New York Times
"Levy’s account has all the great details--how Apple contracted with an outside developer to put together a prototype, how Apple strong armed the guy into working full time for the company. ('I’m doing this for your own good,' Apple executive Jon Rubinstein loftily told the engineer..."
@ Forbes
"There are very few consumer products about which you'd want to read a whole book -- the Google search engine, the first Mac, the Sony Walkman, the VW Beetle. Levy proves that the iPod, which turns five years old today, belongs to that club..."
@ Salon
"What he means is that this gizmo so successfully aligned technology, design, culture and media that the iPod landed smack in the middle of 'just about every controversy of the digital age.' Think of 'perfect,' he says, 'in the spirit of a perfect storm (in a good way, of course)'..."
@ Houston Chronicle
"In the chapter called 'Personal,' for example, he asks, 'Has the iPod destroyed the social fabric?' You know the drill: All those twenty-something slackers plugged into headphones and shutting out the rest of the world instead of engaging with the raw urgency of social life. My almost immediate thought was: give me a break..."
@ Powell's
"Levy's special gift is the ability to simultaneously find the fine lines of the story that are visible in the minor details of, say, Steve Jobs's maunderings about Bob Dylan, and the wide brushstrokes of the social changes unfolding for the entire music industry as the result of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod..."
@ Boing Boing
"[Levy] tries to answer the question of whether shuffling is truly random, querying cryptopgraphers, mathematicians, economists, DJs and people decoding the DNA of music. Ultimately, after much probing, Steven reluctantly concludes that nonrandomness is in our heads, not in the iPod shuffle..."
@ ZDNet
"Levy is absolutely the right man for the job; he has been tracking Apple since its 1984 inception and he has access to both industry heavies, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his rival Bill Gates, with whom he gets to discuss the iPod and pretty much anything else..."
@ Small Shiny Notebook
"But perfect thing? I love my iPod, but is it more perfect than my favorite pair of boots? Or my favorite jacket? Not quite..."
@ designcult
