General Magic and the Soul of Tech
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2025
2:26 · 355K views · Jul 11, 2018
The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.
HN recommends the documentary itself as a story of an epic early failure in mobile computing, and the trailer is the linked entry point.
3 comments from Hacker News
Highly recommend the documentary on General Magic. They were actually trying to build the iPhone as early as 1989 (and into the 90s). My former boss Meghan Smith was part of that team, she loved it — and so many Silicon Valley companies came out of that project. this video
Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android. Here's the trailer: this video I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on, though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.) One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to need or care about money. They say so explicitly, "we didn't care about the money", and that it was all about the vision and passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know what is!
I recently read the story of the Magic Link: [LINK] > When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends. There's a documentary too: this video