Apple Lisa
Lisa, the first desktop with a mouse, cost $10,000 (almost
$24,000 today) and had just 1 MB of RAM. Consumers
weren’t as interested as Apple anticipated, and it was a case
of overpromising and under-delivering, as the 1983 ads —
featuring Kevin Costner — depicted the Lisa as much more
than it really was.
The reason is that the performance is poor at a high cost.
People were interested in machines that cost less than
the $9,995 that Apple offered, preferring the less
expensive IBM PC. Apple lavishly invested in
advertisements, but they failed to persuade potential
buyers. Instead, it created a new issue: the
advertisements promised much more than the product
was which did not help overcome people’s reluctance to
buy Apple Lisa.
Lessons learned:
Transparency matters. It may feel like a buzzword you hear
all the time, but there’s no better way to describe the lesson
learned here other than to say that Apple was not
transparent enough about the Lisa.
We no longer live in an age where you can falsify the
capabilities of a product because social media makes it easier
for the truth to come out and word of mouth will eventually
catch up to — and destroy — projects that lack transparency
There were a number of reasons why the Lisa failed, but the largest reason was its
price: $9,995 (via Mac History). The Lisa's price would be expensive for a modern
PC, but it's important to remember that, when factoring in inflation, the Lisa's
$9,995 price tag is the equivalent of $27,978.17 in 2022 (via CIP Inflation
Calculator). The cost was simply too expensive for the average household, putting it
within reach of only the wealthiest.
In fact, not only did Jobs directly tie the Lisa's failure to its price, but he also
indicated Apple had temporarily lost its way with the project. "First of all, it was too
expensive — about ten grand," Steve Jobs said in an interview with Playboy in 1985
(via CNBC). "We had gotten Fortune 500-itis, trying to sell to those huge
corporations, when our roots were selling to people."
Apple never again lost focus on its roots as a primarily consumer-oriented company,
according to Digital Information World. To a lesser extent, the Lisa also fell victim to
Apple's internal politics. As a result of Steve Jobs' mercurial nature, he was kicked
off the Lisa project in 1980 (via Cult of Mac). Given Jobs' almost maniacal focus on
the consumer, it's possible he could have helped the project stay true to Apple's
roots if he had stayed on. Instead, Jobs looked for something new and quickly began
developing what would be known as the Macintosh.