Movie review: General Magic

★★☆☆☆
2018, 92 minutes

General Magic was a company started in 1990 by some of ex-Apple staffers, working on a pocket communication device and its operating system (Magic Cap, sporting a fascinating room user interface). The product launched in 1994, but swiftly failed in the market, similarly to and concurrently with its chief competitor, Apple Newton. Many alumni of the company – including Megan Smith, Kevin Lynch, Tony Fadell, and Pierre Omidyar – ended up having successful careers in tech after that, to a point that General Magic is referred to as “Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1990s.”

The eponymous documentary, released in 2018, was disappointing to me. Sure, it is well-edited, and particularly shines owing to a lot of archival footage shot during General Magic’s happy years.

Unfortunately, we get to see none of the sort of details I was hoping to see: no pre-release interface or hardware, no discussion of product nuances, no solid reflection on the company, the culture, or the zeitgeist. The movie drops so many fascinating questions and avenues, but doesn’t really follow up on them:

• At some point, Andy Hertzfeld reflects on setting a bad example by focusing on small playful details instead of rallying the team to ship stuff. Where did this realization come from and did that change him as a person going forward?
• In hindsight, did the company benefit or suffer from the culture of freewheeling “superstars” who are also perfectionists? In a strange, brief vignette, a few people talk about not wanting to have any managers – but that is not picked up again or resolved in any way.
• How did the company manage to hire all of this past and future talent? Are there any repeatable lessons in here?
• During the launch, there is a brief slide with “whole person thinking,” which felt unique for a tech product reveal. Near the end of the movie, Kara Swisher talks about worrying how mobile devices can affect and perhaps even impair human-to-human communication. Those two threads are not connected.
• About the only lesson learned and spoken out loud comes from Tony Fadell, who says: “with the iPod, we iterated a lot faster.” Would this have mattered if the premise of the movie seems to be that General Magic was too early on the market anyway?
• There was a mention of a skeuomorphic room interface done pretty much overnight by Andy Hertzfeld. From the perspective of today, it is the device’s perhaps most distinctive characteristic, but it’s not covered more than that one mention.
• In another very rare specific example, there is a beat talking how iPhone’s (very controversial, early on) software keyboard owes its existence to General Magic’s team trying that first. How did whoever created it feel about it?
• An external observer suggests that General Magic missed the early ascendance of the web, but we don’t see anyone from the company reflecting on it.

Unfortunately, I kept thinking of the movie as “generic magic” – a sort of interchangeable valorization of Silicon Valley’s “failure is secretly success in the fullness of time,” defaulting to romantic or rousing music, that must have felt obsolete even in 2018. It felt like the documentary could very well talk about one of the many other companies and efforts, which is frustrating, because there was something special and unique about General Magic.

I also kept remembering The Soul of the New Machine, Andy Hertzfeld’s own Folklore.org, and even Halt and Catch Fire, all of which more adeptly interspersed personal and emotional drama with specific details you could learn from and take home with you. I think General Magic deserved more.

(I do want to recognize that perhaps this wasn’t a movie for me. The documentary is free on YouTube if you want to check it out – it’s consistent throughout, so if you like the early minutes you might like the whole thing.)

(To play with Magic Cap, go to Infinite Mac, click on Macintosh Garden tab at the bottom, search for “magic cap”, click on magic_cap_simulator.sit, go back to the emulator, double click on the Outside World icon, double click on Downloads, double click on the .sit file, wait for it to unpack, close the Downloads window, reopen it, double click on the Magic Cap Simulator icon.)

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