Experience immersive workshops on product development, team building and resilience in the approach to failure, told through the General Magic story.
Learn More




General Magic is available to watch on VOD platforms worldwide.
Learn MoreLearn MoreHost a private screening of General Magic for your organization paired with live panels and team-building workshops.
Learn MoreGet a custom quoteGeneral Magic is the story of the original creators of the smartphone, who after a great failure, changed the lives of billions.
In 1990, at a secretive Silicon Valley start-up, a small and passionate group of innovators and engineers formed to build a magical device that would enable anyone to connect everyone to everywhere and everything – a personal computer in your pocket.
General Magic, though relatively unknown, is considered by many to be one of the most influential innovation startups in the history of technology. This pioneering team—featuring visionaries like Tony Fadell (co-creator of the iPod and iPhone, founder of Nest, author of Build), Megan Smith (former White House CTO, founder of shift7), Marc Porat (original visionary of the smartphone), Andy Hertzfeld (software engineer, original Macintosh team), and Joanna Hoffman (marketing, original Macintosh team)—created the first smartphone and laid the foundation for many of the 21st century's most transformative communication and digital technologies.
While the business of General Magic ultimately did not succeed, the groundbreaking technologies developed by this trailblazing startup and the subsequent ventures led by its team have profoundly impacted the lives of billions.
Discover the General Magic story.
Find streaming and rental options available in your region on JustWatch
or rent it on Prime Video, iTunes, Vimeo, Google Play, Roku Channel, or YouTube.
Contact us about private screenings for your organization.
Please contact us for more information about how to host a private screening, panel or team building event. Former General Magic employees are able to speak on request.
CONTACT US

















“A rippling standing ovation followed the film. We Estonians are typically straight faced as people, resistant to emotion or expression in public, but the film resonated something deep within our audience.
“My hope and dream is that General Magic elevates the purpose of each Town employee.”

The compelling story of General Magic shows the powerful value that lies in failure, perseverance and teamwork amongst other empowering themes. Teams and groups will find inspiration in this legendary piece of history.
Her relationships were constellations rather than contracts. She adored with a brilliant inconsistency: fiercely in one week, distracted the next. People who loved her learned to expect storms and sunbreaks with equal measure. She could be devastating and tender in the same breath — she would speak truth bluntly and then make tea for the wounded heart she’d just exposed. Those who tried to pin her down found themselves disappointed by her refusal to be completed.
She wore curiosity like an amulet. It was not polite or small; it was loud and shapeshifting. She could argue passionately with a stranger about the ethics of a song or cry at a commercial for soup. Her empathy was wild and generous, spilling over into messy interventions and midnight trains. She believed that being fully alive meant being perpetually open to interruption — by beauty, by outrage, by someone else’s sudden need.
In the end, her legend was not tidy. She was not labeled saint or sinner; she was not reduced to a single adjective. “Crazy about other” sounded, at first, like criticism. But lived, it read as a manifesto: to seek, to invite, to refuse certainties, to be generous with attention. Those who carried her memory carried, too, the permission to be fascinated — to be outrageously, recklessly curious — and to love the world outside themselves with all the trouble and tenderness that implies. ssis247decensored she was crazy about other
There was a private mythology to her: rituals invented to honor small pleasures. She judged days by the quality of light in a cafe; she considered thrift-store finds sacred; she kept a jar of ocean-smoothed coins in her kitchen as a repository for chance. She believed in second chances for novels and for people. She delighted in the improbable alignment of moments — the perfect wrong song at the perfect wrong time — and treated those alignments like proof of some capricious benevolence.
She moved through the room like a rumor: bright, unavoidable, not quite believed. Conversations folded into her orbit and then away again, as if gravity had a taste for the absurd. She loved everything that wasn’t owned: stray songs on late-night radio, books with bent spines, jokes that smelled faintly of danger. When she smiled it was an invitation to mischief; when she frowned it was proof that the world still surprised her. Her relationships were constellations rather than contracts
She left traces everywhere she went: a scribbled note tucked into a library book, a plant that thrived for a year under somebody else’s care, a recipe shared on a napkin. People who had known her found their world subtly altered — a new song on a playlist, a postcard pinned to a bulletin board, a daring impulse acted upon because she once mentioned it in passing. Her absence, when it came, felt less like a hole and more like a new doorway: the messy, luminous kind you step through when you decide to love otherness as she had.
Her voice hummed with contradiction. She could be raw and refined, careless and deliberate. In a crowd she drifted toward those on the periphery, the ones who smiled with only half their faces. She was drawn to complication, to flaws that told stories. “Crazy about other” was shorthand for a deeper hunger: for lives larger than the narrow script, for untidy truths, for the shimmering possibility that nothing had to be ordinary. She could be devastating and tender in the
Her passions were promiscuous. Not in a simple-body way, but in a mind that found beauty in the margins: the slow burn of a forgotten film, the way old hands mapped the lines of a city, a single sentence that refused to let go. She collected fragments — overheard confessions, mismatched postcards, recipes written in a hand that trembled — and arranged them into private altars where memory and invention tangled. Friends joked that she was “crazy about other” because everything beyond her own skin fascinated her: other people’s lives, other languages, other truths.

Michael Stern has practiced law in Silicon Valley for 35 years. He has worked with General Magic, Pixar, Adobe, NeXT, and eBay. His varied background as an English professor, journalist, and Dickens scholar led to the story development of the General Magic documentary.
“Working at General Magic was an all-consuming, life-changing experience for me. The company was full of the smartest and most creative people I had ever known. It was a story that cried out to be told.”
Matt is a multi award winning director, writer, cinematographer and producer. At the Tribeca Film Festival, he was nominated for the Best New Director Award.
“There was this amazing moment reviewing the archival film, seeing all these young people sitting on the floor of a tiny office … the people who made the iPod, Nest, Android, eBay, the emoticon, the touch screen, the modem, tools we can’t imagine living without today.”
Sarah, a Peabody Award winner and Emmy nominee, was part of the original documentary crew at General Magic. She has held a number of roles in the Tech industry, most recently as Chief Strategy Officer at Kheiron Medical, dedicated to the detection and treatment of breast cancer using AI.
“Our hope is that this film will inspire the next generation of technologists and makers to learn from those who have gone before them and apply the lessons of General Magic to solving the most important problems of our day.”
Host a private screening of General Magic for your organization paired with live panels and team-building workshops.
Book an Event