Apple's latest release is a coffee table book chronicling 20 years of its past and present products.

Eight years in the making, the book – titled Designed by Apple in California – profiles products from the 1998 iMac to the 2015 Apple Pencil. It is dedicated to the memory of late founder Steve Jobs.

Shot by photographer Andrew Zuckerman in what Apple describes as a "deliberately spare style", the book's 450 images illustrate the company's design process and finished products.

"The idea of genuinely trying to make something great for humanity was Steve's motivation from the beginning, and it remains both our ideal and our goal as Apple looks to the future," said Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief design officer.

"This archive is intended to be a gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years."

Ive, who was promoted to the chief design officer role in 2015, also said he hopes the book will serve as a resource for students by helping them understand how and why the products exist.

This echoes comments made by Ive earlier this year, when he claimed designers are becoming less aware of and interested in "how something is actually made".

Ive also wrote the book's forward.

"While this is a design book, it is not about the design team, the creative process or product development," it reads. "It is an objective representation of our work that, ironically, describes who we are."

"It describes how we work, our values, our preoccupations and our goals," the forward continues. "We have always hoped to be defined by what we do rather than by what we say."

"We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative."

The self-published book is available in two sizes and printed on specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matt silver edges. It costs $299 (£240) for the larger version, and $199 (£160) for the small one.