The Smartphone That Almost Happened in 1991

In the early 1990s, a Silicon Valley startup called General Magic set out to build something that didn't exist yet: a handheld device you could use to call people, send faxes, buy things, book travel, navigate, and play games. It was essentially an iPhone, but nearly two decades before the iPhone existed. The company had everything going for it—legendary engineers, hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Apple, AT&T, Sony, and Motorola, and a vision that was decades ahead of its time. Yet when the product finally launched in 1994, fewer than 3,000 units sold, mostly to friends and family. The company collapsed. The question is: how did a startup with every advantage produce one of the biggest flops in Silicon Valley history?

The Dream Company

Tony Fadel was 21 when he joined General Magic as employee number 29. He had spent months calling the company obsessively, sometimes ten or fifteen times a day, desperate to work with the engineering rock stars he had read about in Rolling Stone. The company was founded by the same team that built the original Macintosh, and it had attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from telecom and electronics giants who wanted a piece of what could be the next big thing.