Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein

The story Dogfight tells feels much more recent than it now is almost two decades on, and yet so far away as smartphones are central to our lives. Back in the mid and late 2000s Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands.

And being on the ground in Silicon Valley would have meant that he would have had access to scuttlebutt given in confidence of anonymity as well as official media access.

But he’s probably best known for being part of the story itself: Fred Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007.

The fight

Dogfight starts some time after Apple had withdrawn support for Motorola’s ROKR phone, which was able to sync with iTunes for music downloads. This particular track of Apple’s history isn’t really documented in Dogfight.

The book goes through two separate but entangled story strands. The first is Apple’s development of the Apple iPhone and iPad. At that time Apple in the space of a…