In 1989, a man named Marc Porat sketched a device in a red notebook: a thin glass rectangle with no keyboard, a screen you touched, a computer that was also a phone, a mailbox, a map, and a store. He called it the Pocket Crystal. He was describing the smartphone, about fifteen years before it arrived.

The company he built to make it real was General Magic, an Apple spin-off staffed by the engineers who had given the Macintosh its soul. It attracted Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Philips, and Matsushita. It went public before it had a product anyone wanted. It failed so completely that its own employees left it off their résumés.

The people inside that building went on to create the iPod, the iPhone, Android, eBay, and the Apple Watch. This is the story of the most important dead company in Silicon Valley, the one that saw the future too clearly, and too soon.

Ways to support our channel:
Patreon: https://patreon.com/designdocs
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/DesignDocs

Other things:
Instagram: @bctld
Portfolio: SingleSpeed.us

Accéder à la chaine Youtube