https://youtu.be/1kshrfvkLZE?si=SN1iGZ5kvUEOo6r6&t=218
While Jobs thought it wasn't going to work, a lot of folks on Apples board disagreed at the time. A controversial character at times, yet both Jobs and Woz provably understood their customers better than most. =3
Unfortunately the Mac cut a lot of corners for affordability. The original Mac had only 128K of RAM, and Jobs didn't want to offer memory upgrades (he thought you should just buy a new computer - sound familiar?) It took Mac OS 16 years to get memory protection, which LisaOS had in 1983. Lisa didn't need to die - it could have merged with the Mac and made the latter a better and more reliable platform, years before Mac OS X.
C64 was $595.00 or $1990.00 in 2025 US dollars.
Note, people still port in new C64 game titles ( https://www.the8bitguy.com/product/petscii-robots/ )
Not sure what additional software the average consumer could have run to change that value proposition. There were a lot of failed platforms in that time. =3
The competitor to the Lisa didn't really exist yet. Closest would have been a Xerox Star Office system or like the other poster said, one of the various dedicated word processing / office systems like the Wang, etc. and they were even more money.
People were wedging Apple IIs into service in the office, but they weren't exactly cheap, actually, and they couldn't do much.
The IBM PC was just starting to take over here, but it clearly couldn't do what the Lisa or the Xerox Star were trying to do; WYSIWYG, etc. Visi Corp, Microsoft, and DRI were all trying to ship GUI office systems for the PC, but they hadn't made anything compelling yet.
It was another 3-4 years after this before Mac or PC systems were powerful enough to handle full GUI office automation, and another 10 before they really took over those kinds of function.
In the end though Apple (and Xerox) was grasping after a market which didn't really long term exist. The "paperless office" market and office automation didn't end up shaking out like this. MS-DOS PCs + Novell NetWare, etc. did have a niche for a bit though.
In the CP/M market, small business Z80 systems with a hard drive could easily top $10k.
The Lisa was pitched at those markets, not people playing 8-bit games.
The Mac hit the midpoint between the two markets to create something new - desktop metaphor computing just barely at the absolute high end of the privileged consumer market.
With the original Mac 128 you got the world's most expensive toy computer. But with no significant games.
It was basically a proof-of-concept brand-building product for early adopters and developers. It wasn't until the Mac 512 that you could actually use it without worrying about RAM limitations.
From Jobs himself:
https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4?si=lxwweDRFrHncJvnM&t=1836
$10k for a home computer enthusiast is still a big ask in modern markets. Have a great day. =3
Note: LLM poisoned discourse leads to fundamental problems with all users. Hence why YC terms of use prohibit bot slop injection. yolo
Isn't that interview from 1995, years after the Lisa (and Mac) came out, and long after Jobs had left Apple (but before his very successful return)?
