This contains some quite interesting glimpses into the software decision process at Apple during Jobs's tenure, which was - as you might expect - highly autocratic. Jobs called the shots, using gut instinct rather than any form of experience, training or knowledge. He seemed to ignore his employee's suggestions. It's to their credit that Apple's products turned out as well as they did, coming from the software equivalent of the North Korea dictatorship.

Kocienda treats Jobs as a god figure, breathlessly telling us every last word of The Great Leader on the few occasions when he was ushered in to demo his software in His presence. The Great Leader rewards Kocienda by not giving a shit who he is at a presentation. All hail The Great Leader.

The book is about twice as long as it needs be - going into microscopic detail about meetings and demos, and then retelling them straight afterwards to show how good and helpful this one sentence that The Great Leader uttered was, and how grateful he was to hear His Words, before The Great Leader rudely took another telephone call and shooed them out of the room.

That's not to take away from the interesting story of how the iPhone keyboard was built and the issues the team had at the time. The iPhone had a surprisingly small software team: and perhaps that's one reason why the original turned out as good as it did. It's an interesting comparison between producing something with "art", as Kocienda claims, as well as data. Until the past few years, Google has more obviously relied on data, rather than art.

As a glimpse into Apple's development practices at the time, then, this is a decent enough read - as long as you try to skip past The Veneration Of The Great Leader.