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 haul 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 !”.
yeah but how much to upgrade memory and SSD? since they are soldered to the motherboard you can’t get them cheaper elsewhere either…
RAM is on the SoC. SSD you can upgrade.
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…
An Intel i7-875K from 2010 gives a single-thread Passmark of 1353. The best Intel and Apple today do close to 5000. The 3.75X performance may seem like a lot, but only compute-heavy programs provide a sensed difference.
Today, the multi-thread crown goes to AMD at 160778, the best Intel at 91470, the best Apple at 73785. The vintage 17-875K scores 3142. My i7-875K was running in Jan 2011, and has been powered on continuously for about 7 years.
PCs are almost all 3rd-party products; use good parts and good assembly techniques, clean it when it becomes dusty, and it isn’t likely to fail. Buy a “price-optimized” bargain PC with a marginal power supply and a weak fan, and you’ll be replacing it too soon.
2-3 times/decade? Seriously? What the heck are people doing with these things?
My Lenovo Ideacenter 700 i7-6700 is still a daily driver after 10 years. Added memory, added disks, updated monitors, but original components including video card are still running just fine, doing dual-5k video and still the fastest machine in the house: Hard to measure head:head but on par with the Dell R710 12-core dual Xeon house homelab.
I don’t see any need to replace the Lenovo any time soon. And the cost in 2015 was less than $1000. A Macbook Pro has come and gone since then. A Mac Mini got since then survives, but is too slow for anything but a media server now. Both were more expensive than that desktop, the ‘Pro much more: very poor value for money, and ergonomically a horrible experience to use.
Problem being that an i3 12100F and a motherboard, (re-use your RAM) comes in around $100 used and provides roughly the performance of an i7 8700 or 9700. Not to mention uses much less electricity.
Basically if you hate upgrading with an unreasonable passion buy an i7, but if you want 25-50% higher processing power on average for the same money over time just buy an i5 (or Ryzen5) system every 2-4 years. The money saved can go into RAM, storage, GPU, screen, peripherals etc. Plot a price/performance curve and try not to get too steep on it as the price goes up. Also gives you the option to buy last gen i7 when they are clearanced. i7 12700KF has been $160-170 4 or 5 times in the past year, which is stellar value.
To clarify, as the i5 performance will surpass the i7 performance with a massive savings (usually enough to upgrade to the next i5, possibly even including the platform), then by saving that money initially you can get higher performance by upgrading more frequently using the saved money.
i call bullshit on that statement. My PC from 2012 is still up and running, even the harddrives are original. Started out with windows 7, then migrated win 10 once that came to the market. Now hitting a wall cause windows 11 doesnt wanna install itself, theres hacks around that, but a machine from -12 deserves to be relegated to lighter duties.
Overpriced especially when the hardware consistently lags behind.
That’s a clichè, maybe. It depends how we value things and which priorities users have.
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.
That’s why I sold my Mac collection, funnily enough. I realized my whole experience of the hobby was minor fix->oh, it turns on and works now!->okay I’m bored.
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!
You mis-spelled 10-year old computer. I am gaming at a decent (better than console) level on some 10 year old systems. I7 6700K and 970/980 still work.
The thing about the original IBM PC was that it basically was what we used to be calling “barebone PC” in the 2000s.
You had to install HDD, expansion cards for serial, printer, video card, memory, EMS board, bus mouse etc pp.
So the initially “cheap” IBM PC price tag quickly increases..
But on bright side, the IBM PC could be configured in every way to suit personal needs.
By 1991, 256KB of RAM was useless on DOS platform.
It barely was enough to boot PC-DOS 3.30 from 1987 and having leftover RAM for an application.
640KB of conventional memory was an assumed standard configuration on PC platform since ca. 1986.
Before, it was 512KB (Amstrad PC1512 had 512KB).
So either the previous user had no clue or he had used the PC for only one application that required little RAM. No idea.
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.
I was at WCI as well. When we liquidated I sold the Lisa to a friend. Your development boxes were networked with the VAX 11/750.
“…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.
Good points.
RE: 1 – Lessons of the 1973 Oil Crisis didn’t teach US any valuable lessons. (keep it home and make is more efficient than any offshore investments). Don’t forget the political twist, too – Middle Eastern “US Intersts” were mostly one well-known US politician’s br … pardon … investment. Exclusive club. The name is sometimes is in the news. I’ll leave that where it is. Public information available to those willing to research the US history. Last century, obviously. Quite related to why US got involved there in the late 1990s. Directly related. Zero merit to the average Sam who pays for all this with his taxes. I’d very much rather US invented cold fusion cars in the 1980s and weaned off crude oil as the primary energy source. Because the cleanest/best crude one can wish for is in Venezuela. Yes. Minimum refinement and less toxic refuse that usually goes with oil cracking.
Again, no lessons learned, but a LOT of mess. We could have invested all those gazillion megabucks into things like municipal boron-hydrogen reactors that never go boom and boron is available literally everywhere as a fuel. Municipal level, so these can be placed strategically, thus, lessening the need for the lengthy transmission as well as the need for the power-producing monopolies/cartels that we have now, all gulping up my tax money to make them “profitable”. Which brings the obvious point, if it is not profitable without my tax money, the hell with it, time to go back to the keynesyan economy, government-chartered entities, Fannie Mae, etc etc.
2 – Canadian tar sands project was aimed at China, but russkies intervened and sold China their crude for the price of delivery. The plot had thickened even more, when it was realized that the only US cargo railroad leg available from tar sands to the Mexican Gulf is a monopoly. Hence, investments HAD to be realized through The Pipe. Makes no sense again. Wasted opportunity, too, because sanctions COULD HAVE BEEN applied back then, yet they weren’t. You can guess the slow pokes who made fools of themselves. I won’t mention names, they are everywhere. Same slow pokes who I didn’t elect – I called them clowns back then, they are still clowns.
3 – yes and no. Re-read my comment – Permian Basin has a lot of CLOSED pumps awaiting their pumping rights to be sold to the highest bidder. Same difference with the residential housing that stands unoccupied next to where I live – nada, not even a stray water hose laying on the neatly trimmed grass. Because. Rights trade just like stocks, today they are hot, tomorrow – penny stocks.
If it is not profitable, I get it, but the thing is, it is artificially not profitable, and can be made profitable by keynesyan economy, again, government charters that make s**t happen, again, Fannie Mae, etc etc. Plenty around. Heh, now that I think of it, a lot of industries are in dire need of nationalization, whether unsustainable business models’ owners like it or now – because they ARE wrecking our economy. Nationalization is not a nasty word, and it is not related to socialism – it is proper course of action when owners had lost their mind, given that the eventual new owners will be saner.
As far as expertise goes, there are very, very smart people who spend their whole lives learning how things work, and what to do when they don’t. Sadly, the current political fad seem to be the blind wrecking ball, not hiring the smartest geniuses to do their jobs properly. That rarely delivers profitable markets, though, sure clears up the ground for the next generation – however, the largest cartels seem to found the way to survive any wrecking ball, and it is sad.
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”.
Let’s not shut down all those perfectly usable factories making incandescent light bulbs.
Uhm, I thought we discarded all such waste in Africa and China in the old days? Or did that start later?
This approach of destroying perfectly working devices went into even cars, as depicted by the documentary film “Who killed the electric car” regarding what GM did with the EV1 leased cars.
“3.25-inch floppy drive”?
Because, 2600 would be ironic…
About Lisa vs Mac..
The development software for Macintosh was available on Lisa only (initially).
So the Lisa was akin to a developer’s workstation at the time.
If you wanted to write Macintosh software, you had to go get a Lisa, too. ;)