How did we ever live without the iPod?

He breezily covers the history of transistor technology and the sweeping evolution of the "personal audio experience" as both technology and business battleground, from the crude forerunners of Sony's Walkman to the advent of the MP3 format and its early players to the daggers-out days of Napster and the file-sharing firms that followed.

The rise of legal online music store iTunes is cast as only a matter of time. As Jobs told Levy in 2004: "The Internet was built to deliver music." Jobs's triumph: leveraging Apple's smallness in the world of personal computing to win the race and revolutionize the method and the machinery.

Levy laces the book with telling company lore: The English judge who heard a case involving a Beatles lawsuit over Apple's entry into the music business (the name Apple is also a Beatles trademark) began proceedings by confessing that he was an avid iPod user.

At a late-'90s event unveiling the iMac, Jobs – though well-versed in intellectual-property law – boldly insisted on using a cartoon video clip from "The Jetsons" even when he learned at the last minute that permission had not yet been formally granted. (The paperwork went though after the fact.)

Levy assigns Jobs a few warts, if hesitantly. Apple workers are described as being frustrated at times by their boss's legendary stubbornness and stung by his occasionally dismissive critiques. And Levy describes an exchange Jobs had with Casey Neistat, whose much-downloaded film "The iPod's Dirty Secret," detailed Mr. Neistat's 2003 experience with Apple support staff. When his battery died prematurely, Neistat was told that for what a new battery would cost, he might as well buy a new iPod.

Apple's replacement policy was soon rewritten (the company said a change had already been planned). But Neistat later wrote to Jobs asking whether he thought the initial policy had been a mistake. "Nope," Jobs wrote back in full, according to Levy. "I don't think Apple made a mistake. Steve."

Jobs gives little ground. Asked by Levy how he finds the viewing experience on the video iPod's tiny screen, Jobs replies "fine," faint praise, Levy points out, from someone prone to hurl such adjectives as "insanely great."

But both Apple and Jobs, Levy persuades, continue to emit brilliance, navigating the rocks of digital rights management, morphing the product, winning over fans from rock stars to college kids to preteen girls.

"When companies ... think of improvements to their products, they figure out how to put more capacity in them, extend battery life, make more colors, add FM radios," Levy writes. "But they don't make iPods, and people know it."

• Clay Collins, a Monitor staff writer, lives in a four-iPod household.

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