Riiven Reverb
General Magic
In 1990, a group of Apple engineers left to build the iPhone. It shipped in 1994. Nobody bought it.
The Moment
In 1990, the personal computer was a beige box anchored to a desk. The web was a paper Tim Berners-Lee had not yet finished. "Phones" were bricks tied to wall sockets, and the people who carried pagers were either doctors or drug dealers. Apple was the company that had shipped the Macintosh six years earlier and was still figuring out what came next. A small group inside it had a different answer: a pocket-sized device that would let you tap a screen, send mail, buy things, and talk to friends, all through a friendly cartoon city. Their bet did not require new physics. It required a network and a market that did not yet exist.
The Original
Marc Porat, Bill Atkinson, and Andy Hertzfeld spun out of Apple in 1990 to build it. The company was called General Magic. The platform was Magic Cap: a touchscreen handheld with an animated UI, on-device email, a stylus, and a marketplace of third-party programs called "downtown." The device itself would not be theirs to sell. Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Philips, and Matsushita all signed on to license the software and ship hardware. The Sony Magic Link arrived in 1994 at $800. The Motorola Envoy followed. Each one was a recognisable ancestor of the device most readers are using to read this sentence. Each one, in 1994, was a glossy curiosity nobody could find a reason to buy.
The Gap
· Era constraintThe era was not ready in three specific ways. First, the network: the consumer web was still two years off, GSM phones did not roam, and "data over the air" cost more per kilobyte than long-distance voice. Magic Cap leaned on a proprietary network, AT&T's PersonaLink, that almost nobody dialled into. Second, the price: $800 in 1994 dollars (roughly $1,700 today) bought a device whose killer apps were a year away from existing. Third, the mental model: customers had no slot in their lives for a touchscreen pocket computer; the category had no name and no shelf. There was also one self-inflicted choice. The team treated Magic Cap as a finished art-piece, slow to open up to outside developers, and slow to compromise the cartoon city for the duller forms competitors were starting to ship. By 1997, the company was on life support.
no consumer web, no GSM coverage, no smartphone mental model
Watch
GENERAL MAGIC Official Trailer (2018)
General MagicThe Echo → 2007
The alumni list, read three decades later, is jarring. Tony Fadell carried the design discipline through the iPod and then Nest. Andy Rubin built Android. Megan Smith became the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Add Pierre Lamond, Susan Kare, Joanna Hoffman, and Kevin Lynch, and the documentary roll of credits looks less like a startup post-mortem and more like a yearbook for the next twenty years of consumer technology. The iPhone announcement in 2007 was, in one literal sense, General Magic shipped onto a network that had finally arrived. It was the same product idea, asked again across seventeen years, on three different companies, with three different names.
Why Now
How do you tell whether you are early or wrong? Probably not from inside the moment. The General Magic alumni share one thing: they kept asking the same question across decades, on different machines, with different names. Maybe the question is not whether the product survives. Maybe it is whether the question does.
Sources
- Sony Magic Link PIC-1000 (National Museum of American History collection record) (1994) · primary
- Byte Magazine, "Sony releases Magic Cap device" (via GUIdebook Gallery archive) (1994) · primary
- Markoff, J. "Computing in Your Pocket: The Prehistory of the iPhone in Silicon Valley" (Computer History Museum) (2017) · retrospective
- Kerruish, S. & Maude, M. General Magic (documentary film) (2018) · retrospective