Not a lot of people know about General Magic the company, and even more do not know there is a movie that is playing in some locations about General Magic and it appears to be on Showtime as well…

“General Magic”, a documentary feature film produced and directed by Sarah Kerruish & Matt Maude (trailer).

The ideas that dominate the tech industry and our day to day lives were born at a secretive Silicon Valley start-up called ‘General Magic’, which spun out of Apple in 1990 to create the “next big thing”.

General Magic shipped the first handheld personal communicator (or “smartphone”) in 1994. The film combines rare archival footage with powerful honesty from the “Magicians” today, reflecting on the most influential Silicon Valley company no one has ever heard of.

Featuring legendary members of the original Macintosh team, along with the creators of the iPod, iPhone, Android, and eBay, this is the story of one of history’s most talented tech teams, who after a great failure, went on to change the lives of billions. 

Saw the movie on its last night in NYC at the IFC Center. One of the few documentaries about designing and shipping a hardware and software product in the 90s. Lots of folks in the movie are (in some circles) household names for programming and hardware, and lots have founded companies, sold companies, developed the iPod, Android, became the USA CTO, works on Apple Watch…

Worth watching, if streaming it could be watched in less than the run time if skipping through all the drone / nature scenes between the interviews and footage from the 90s, etc.