Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Mark Peratt left the company.

General Magic limped on for a few more years, then collapsed.

Mark Peratt's marriage collapsed too.

He might have felt that he had unlimited time and unlimited energy, but the truth was that he only had so much to give.

And instead of giving it to his wife and children, he gave it all to perfect strangers.

We all have limits in the end.

The question is when we face up to them.

People did learn lessons from what happened at General Magic.

One of the young magicians was Tony Fadell.

When General Magic had started up, he'd phone them every day, begging for a job, until finally they let him in.

When it fell apart, he was devastated.

But he learned.

Andy eventually moved to another tech company and paid close attention to two things that General Magic had neglected.

Number one, what's new and exciting and possible given current technology?

Number two, what deadline can we set ourselves to keep us on track?

The answer to the first question was that there was a new way to compress digital music, the MP3, and ever cheaper hard drives.

The combination of the two might allow a digital music player that could make portable cassette and CD players obsolete.

The answer to the second question, it's January 2001 and we're going to ship something by Christmas.

The company that Tony Fadell had joined was Apple.

And the product that he shepherded to market on time just a few weeks before Christmas was the iPod.

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