Two Takes: One Picture, Two Photographers

Cook is taking the book seriously enough that he was moved to give CNBC a statement dismissing it as "nonsense." (Apple bristling at an unflattering book, incidentally, isn't new or un-Jobslike. In 2005, it reacted to John Wiley & Sons' plans to publish a stinging biography of Steve Jobs by pulling all of the publisher's tomes from its stores, thereby giving the bio a priceless jolt of free publicity. This time around, it doesn't seem to be conducting a similar boycott: You can buy Haunted Empire itself from Apple's own iBooks store.) Of course, there's no scenario in which Apple would shower praise on a sharply critical book about it. But when Cook says that Haunted Empire "fails to capture Apple, Steve, or anyone else in the company," he happens to right. In an author's note, Kane says that Haunted Empire is based on five years' worth of reporting on Apple (including her time at The Wall Street Journal) and more than 200 interviews. To be sure, there are moments when the breadth and depth of her research pay off richly. Some tidbits are new -- at least to me -- such as the details of Steve Jobs' unhappiness with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera over the latter's commentary on Jobs' health. The best, most vividly-reported extended sections are the chapters on Apple's Taiwanese contract manufacturer, Foxconn; maybe Kane should have written a book entirely on that topic. But the closer that she gets to the book's conceptual nub -- that Tim Cook's Apple has created one disaster after another for itself -- the shallower the story gets. That's not entirely Kane's fault: Any writer trying to tell Apple's inside story is automatically hobbled by the fact that Apple grants few on-the-record interviews, and usually not in situations which require it to deal with unhappy subjects head-on. Still, there are plenty of instances in which I was hoping for more insight on an Apple mishap -- such as its brief, inexplicable decision to entrust the Apple Stores to John Browett, the CEO of a famously cheesy chain of British electronics stores -- and didn't get much that hadn't already been widely covered elsewhere. Kane doesn't dismiss all evidence of Apple post-Jobs successes: There's mention of popular products and successful quarters. But she doesn't find space to acknowledge the biggest triumphs. When Apple's market capitalization passed Exxon's in August 2011, she gives it a paragraph but doesn't explain that this victory made Apple not just more valuable than Exxon, but the most valuable company in the world, period. Nor did I find mention of the fact that Apple has continued to collect the vast majority of the smartphone industry's profits even as its market share has shrunk -- a data point which would tend to suggest that Apple has outfoxed the competition rather than being trounced by it. Again and again, Kane paints a picture in which there's no such thing as news which doesn't indicate that Apple is in trouble. In Haunted Empire, as Macworld's Jason Snell points out, it's alarming when the cheap iPhone 4s holds its own in sales against the pricier iPhone 5 -- and when consumers opt to buy the top-of-the-line iPhone 5s rather than the lower-cost iPhone 5c. As for Tim Cook, when he shows little emotion in meetings and puts the screws to his employees and suppliers, it's not a good sign. When team members have enough time to take vacations and he thoughtfully avoids intruding upon them...well, that, too, is a bad sign. During an account of Jobs's 2010 WWDC keynote, during which his demo of the iPhone 4 went awry and he asked attendees to get off the Wi-Fi network, Kane asserts that "(m)ost of the audience thought he was joking, even though Jobs' tone was serious." Why she believes she's qualified to judge the majority opinion, I'm not sure. (For the record, I was in the crowd that day, and didn't think for a nanosecond that Jobs was just kidding around.) That Kane devotes considerable space to a Steve Jobs demo running off the rails wrong points to a basic problem with her thesis. In the Jobs era, things went wrong constantly. Products disappointed. Customers got unhappy. The stock market responded to Apple keynotes by selling Apple stock. All the stuff which happens today to Cook's Apple happened to Jobs's Apple. And while it's true that Jobs' communications skills and personal charisma sometimes helped to paper over problems, anyone who thinks that the company wasn't subject to constant criticism in those days is haunted by a romantic ideal of an Apple which never actually existed. (Kane trashes