In 1983, when Apple released the Lisa, it was presented to the world as a new business computer that would be a strong follow-up to the Apple II. It was released after a very long development process with a lot of delays. Lisa shook up the computer world, mainly because its cost was so high: $9,995 (about $34,400 in September 2026 dollars when adjusted for inflation). The price tag was about twice the target Apple set in 1980, when it planned to sell Lisa for under $5,000. Many years of development went into creating Lisa, but many who don’t know about this old Apple system may be wondering if it was all worth it. Those who do know about Lisa’s past are often surprised that it didn’t ruin Apple, even as its ideas helped change computing as we know it today:
Specs and Details
Lisa was one of the first personal computers with a GUI (graphical user interface) to be sold commercially, and this was only the start of Lisa’s impressive specs. While nothing much today, Lisa packed a wallop in the early 1980s. Lisa boasted a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 5 MHz and 1 MB of RAM, which could be expanded to 2 MB with a third-party memory board. Lisa came with two Apple FileWare 5.25-inch floppy drives. Dual-sided, they had a capacity of 871 KB each and could only be used with special diskettes.
An external 5 MB hard drive came with the original Lisa, and a 10 MB option would be released later. Lisa had expansion slots so that users had the option to keep expanding and upgrading their machine, like with an interface card. All in all, its hardware was quite competitive and advanced for the time.
Lisa’s main problems, however, were related to both its hardware and software. It came with a special operating system that was partially built from the Apple III SOS operating system. The system was altogether sluggish, and the virtual memory Lisa used could make it slower when RAM ran low.
Reception
Lisa was a big flop for Apple commercially, largely due to its high price, sluggish performance, and unreliable floppy drives. The price scared away many potential buyers because it was simply outside their budgets.
Many business owners went to the far more inexpensive IBM PCs that were already available and were starting to dominate the commercial sector. Users wanting an Apple computer jumped for the Apple Macintosh, released just a year later; the Mac had a faster processor and was much cheaper.
Significance
Although Lisa was essentially a flop, it was still a very significant computer. Lisa was innovative in many ways that advanced computing. One example of this was the documents Lisa could produce when coupled with the dot-matrix printer Apple released; users could see how documents would look on screen before printing them. Some of the features offered by Lisa, such as ‘Protected Memory’, were not incorporated into the standard Mac operating system until Mac OS X was released in 2001, which itself is a testament to how advanced Lisa was as a personal computer.
Lisa could have ended up writing a very different history for Apple, as the slow and expensive Lisa was released after the even more abysmal Apple III. Luckily for all of us, however, Apple would follow these flopped machines with the Macintosh and manage to change the future of computing.