Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation, Part II

How do you innovate on a book? Sure, you can update the content, but it's still a book. You could always make a coffee table book about coffee tables that turns into a coffee table, but that's fiction, not fact.

About a year and a half ago I reviewed a beautiful book, ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation. The author, Jonathan Zufi, who is also the creator of The Shrine of Apple has published a collection of over 650 unique Apple photos. His book included not only virtually every Apple product, but prototypes and packaging too. Zufi recently republished an updated book with more than a dozen new pages and photos. But that, alone, wouldn't be enough to make it innovative. His latest edition is ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition. This magnum opus is delivered in a clamshell case with a custom printed circuit board (PCB) designed to pulse an LED embedded inside the case. The result is that the LED in the case cover respirates like a sleeping Apple computer when the book case is picked up.

What makes life interesting is the story behind the story. In the case of The Ultimate Edition, it's the elegantly designed and incorporated PCB that makes it uniquely interesting. Unique in the truest sense of the word.

The circuit is powered by the high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller which combines 1KB in-system programming flash memory, 32B SRAM, 4 general purpose I/O lines, 16 general purpose working registers, a 16-bit timer/counter with two pulse-width modulation channels, internal and external interrupts, programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator, an internal calibrated oscillator, and 4 software selectable power saving modes.

In true fashion, ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition is designed with the tender loving care and attention to detail only seen in Apple products.