David Pogue Audiobooks

Apple: fifty years of the world's most valuable company, told by the man who covered it

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

78 listener ratings

Who is David Pogue?

Thirteen years as a Macworld columnist, thirteen more as technology columnist at The New York Times, and seven Emmy awards for his work on CBS Sunday Morning: David Pogue has been explaining machines to people for about as long as most of us have owned any. Born in 1963, he trained in music at Yale and spent his early career conducting and arranging on Broadway, a stranger route into technology journalism than it sounds and probably the source of the timing in his prose.

He built the Missing Manual series on a simple premise, that software arrives without instructions and somebody ought to write them, then published widely on Macs, iPhones and the everyday panic of unfamiliar devices. In recent years his subjects have broadened towards climate preparedness and a general curiosity about how things work.

Pogue’s gift is not simplification so much as company. He assumes you are intelligent, assumes nothing about what you already know, and finds the joke in the manual without ever sneering at the reader.

David Pogue in audiobooks

Apple is his biggest swing: a full account of the company across fifty years, from the garage through the near-death years, the Jobs restoration and the trillion-dollar Cook era. He conducted around a hundred and fifty fresh interviews for it, and a good deal of long-standing Apple folklore gets quietly corrected along the way.

Pogue narrates it himself across more than twenty-three hours, which is the right call. He has been telling these stories on television for decades and the timing already lives in his voice, so the anecdotes land as anecdotes rather than as paragraphs read aloud.

Listener ratings are solid and the reviews keep arriving. No technical background is needed; if you have ever owned one of the products, you are already the intended audience. Start it below.