In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing else on the market, and had a price tag to match—retailing at $9,995, or the equivalent of over $30,000 today.
It held so much promise. And yet, come 1989, Apple was burying almost 3,000 examples in a landfill. What went wrong?
Promise
The Lisa computer, released in 1983, was Apple’s first attempt at bringing a graphical user interface to the masses. The name was officially an acronym for “Local Integrated Software Architecture,” though many believed it was actually named after Steve Jobs’ daughter. In any case, the Lisa was groundbreaking in ways that wouldn’t be fully appreciated until years later.
The Lisa stepped away from the long-lived 6502 CPU that had powered the Apple II line. Instead, it relied upon the exciting new Motorola 68000, with its hybrid 16-bit/32-bit architecture and fast 5 MHz clock speed. The extra power came in handy, as the Lisa was to be one of the first retail computers to be sold with a graphical user interface—imaginatively titled Lisa OS. Forget command lines and character displays—the Lisa had icons and a mouse, all rendered on a glorious 720 x 364 monochrome monitor with rectangular pixels. Adopters of Apple’s new rectangular machine also got twin 5.25-inch double-sided floppy drives, and the Lisa included three expansion slots and a parallel port for adding additional peripherals.
The Lisa seemed to offer a great leap forward in capability, but the same could be said of its price. At launch in 1983, it retailed at $9,995, equivalent to over $30,000 in 2025 dollars. The price was many multiples beyond what you might pay for an IBM PC, making it a tough pill to swallow even given what the Lisa had to offer. The GUI might have been cutting-edge, too, but the implementation wasn’t perfect. The Lisa had a tendency to chug.
There was also a further problem. Apple’s very own Steve Jobs may have worked on the Lisa, but he was kicked off the project in 1981, prior to launch. Jobs then jumped ship to the nascent Macintosh development effort, which was initially intended to be a low-cost text-based computer retailing for under $1,000. Jobs swiftly redirected the Macintosh project to make it a GUI-based machine, while retaining the intention to come in at a far more affordable price-point than the exorbitantly-priced Lisa.
The result was damaging. Just as the Lisa was launching, rumors were already swirling about Apple’s upcoming budget machine. When the Macintosh hit the market in 1984, it immediately blitzed the Lisa in sales. Both machines had a mouse and a GUI, and the Macintosh even had a more forward-looking 3.25-inch floppy drive. True, the Mac wasn’t anywhere near as beefy as the Lisa; most notably, it had just 128K of RAM to the 1MB in Apple’s flagship machine. Ultimately, though, the market voted Mac—perhaps unsurprising given it retailed at $2,495—a quarter of the Lisa’s debut price. Come May, Apple had sold 70,000 units, thanks in part do a legendary commercial directed by the Ridley Scott. Meanwhile, it took the Lisa a full two years to sell just 50,000.
Apple tried to make the best of things. The Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, and it was then rebadged as the Macintosh XL. Ultimately, though, it would never find real purchase in the marketplace, even after severe price cuts down to $3,995 in 1985. By 1986, it was all over—Apple discontinued the Lisa line.
The following years weren’t kind. A bunch of 5000 Lisas ended up being bought by third-party company Sun Remarketing, which upgraded them and sold them on as “Lisa Professionals” and “Macintosh Professionals.” However, cut to 1989, and Apple had a better idea. The Lisas were going to a dump in Logan, Utah.
The story would end up making the news, with The Herald Journal reporting on what was then an astounding story. 2,700 brand new computers were being sent to straight to landfill. This was particularly shocking in the era, given that computers were then still relatively novel in the marketplace and sold for an incredibly high price.
The reason behind it was pure business. “Right now, our fiscal year end is fast approaching and rather than carrying that product on the books, this is a better business decision,” Apple spokesperson Carleen Lavasseur told the press. Apple was able to gain a tax write off the computers, and it was estimated it could reclaim up to $34 for every $100 of depreciated value in the machines which were now considered obsolete. Apple paid $1.95 a yard for over 880 cubic yards of space at the landfill to dump the machines. Other reports on the event noted that guards apparently stood on site to ensure the machines were destroyed and could not be recovered.
It’s a story that might recall you of Atari’s ET, another grand embarrassment covered up under a pile of trash. Sometimes, products fail, and there’s little more to do than call the trucks and all them away. The Apple Lisa is perhaps one of the nicer machines that’s ever happened to.
The link to jhnews is blocked from Europe
Try https://archive.ph/osabj
Great, thanks !
You did create this ‘snapshot’, right ? hence the short url… ?
Does it specify the reason why?
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Apple hardware is still far overpriced compared to non-Apple stuff
Before the M-series chip rollout maybe, but not always, anymore. The M4 Mac Mini on sale for $450 right now is a bargain.
Wow, that is actually pretty insane
Since the dawn of time I’ve heard “Apple prices used to be highly exaggerated, but not anymore”. But it’s just a mix of great marketing and people using an excuse to buy one.
It’s the same with “Java used to be very slow, a memory hog, and unsafe. But now it’s all fixed !”.
Not when one considers that the Mac will still function well a decade later, while your PC user will have been forced to replace his rig 2 or 3 times in that same decade… i am on my 3rd iMac since 1998, a 2012 model which still kicks serious azz…
They knew the Amiga was coming two years later to kill it. ;) (only joking)
yeah folks, people are interested in money, but money is never interested in people…
it was a nicely build machine and very easy to work on. i had three of the 2/10 macintosh xl and got every hd working again. very strange, as they are notoriously unreliable. but i lost interest as soon i was done with the software i could find for it.
This follows Steve Jobs very successful approach to the business. When the Apple II sales were accelerating he did not like the amount of time and resources the small company was spending on support to the Apple I owners. He offered a very attractive trade-in discount for new Apple II. Steve did not want these units to escape back into the wild. When the stack of trade-ins got big enough a friend of mine, employee #49, would run them through a band saw. I gave her credit for the rarity and high value of an Apple I. Lisa had the same support resources issue.
Not uncommon. In the late ’90s I worked on a product that, as it came to market, was deemed to have violated a patent held by a competitor (who, incidentally, we had also done work for). The whole production run got chucked into landfill and destroyed.
However, if a Chinese or Japanese company violated the patent? Why, that’s fine! Hell, we’ll even let you import it and pressure people to license the technology to a local producer!
It was a strange time.
Not if they filed. Micron stopped whole parts of the industry cold over RAM and anti-dumping. I was part of the by-catch because video RAM from Japan (the only source) tripled in price overnight.
I was at the dump like probably close to 30 years ago and saw someone hefting one of these out of the trunk of their car, was in the process of walking over to be like hey I’ll give you 20 bucks for that if you haul it back out and meet me in the parking lot when one of the loader operators ran it over :( Much later the dump added an e-waste drop off in the recycling drop off area that was outside the gate and they basically didn’t give a rat’s ass if anyone snagged stuff from it, got a few treasures that way…
“At launch in 1983, it retailed at $9,995, equivalent to over $30,000 in 2025 dollars. The price was many multiples beyond what you might pay for an IBM PC…”
Maybe not. I once bought an IBM PC at a yard sale for $30. Taped to the bottom of the PC’s case was the business invoice from when the unit was originally purchased in 1985. An IBM PC-XT (4.77 MHz 8088) with 256K of RAM, a 10 MB MFM hdd, a single 5.25″ floppy drive, and green Hercules monochrome, was a bargain at only $4995, half the Lisa’s price.
Of course, it was practically worthless by 1991 when I got it. (These days a 6 year old computer can still be a halfway decent gaming rig.)
Pretty crazy to think, in ’83 the 5150 was still sold in its “base” form, 16kb of ram and no disk drives (floppy or hd), and didn’t come with a monitor (I don’t think EGA was out quite yet anyway)
That 256k ram upgrade was probably half or more of that $5k price tag when new!
Back in ’84 the place I was working had to buy one (WCI Labs) as we were looking at doing development (porting games) for the Mac and a Lisa was the only supported development system.
“…this is a better business decision…” sure brings up (supposedly) Kurt Voneggut’s (unduly forgotten) “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”
Same does for the uncounted cars destroyed during Depression Era that could have been given away to all those families frantically looking for jobs.
Same goes for plenty other things – quite a lot of food that it is actually not bad or rotten, but thrown away nightly in the US – just because there is no profit to be made, into the dumpster it goes. Canned or not, no difference. Just because.
Profit-shmofit, human stupidity at its worst, just like the infamous Keystone pipeline that supposed to run crude oil right past the Permian Basin with plenty of crude oil within, some – strategically “bought” and closed up to jack up the pricing, so running a pipeline all the way across the US could still be profitable.
Call me stupid, but this all makes zero sense.
Scenarios where it makes 100% sense to consume your neighbor’s oil instead of your own:
1) You realize that oil is a non-renewable resources so you might as well consume your neighbor’s oil while it is cheap, leaving your own supply in the ground until oil inevitably becomes scarce and valuable.
2) Your neighbor’s oil is derived from “tar sands” which requires extremely high tech plants to refine. You dominate the hemisphere in that kind of refinery capacity, so your neighbor is forced to do business with you on favorable terms.
3) Your own oil reserves require fracking, which is a fairly expensive process. Your wells frequently become unprofitable when international oil prices fall. You are a capitalist, so your wells are generally turned off during these times.
All 3 apply in the US.
Apple sold a large number of Lisa computers to entering Virginia Tech computer science students and the student price was much less than $9,995. Those machines could run Lisa OS or Xenix, but I can’t remember if all of them had the big hard drive. Even with the reduced price, I couldn’t affort one and used machines in the university computer labs and those machines did have the 10MB drives.
Logan city landfill? I wonder if anybody knows approximately where it got buried… Would be fun to go mining
You know that as a society we are truly f*cked up when destroying perfectly usable equipment is deemed “reasonable”.
Uhm, I thought we discarded all such waste in Africa and China in the old days? Or did that start later?