Why Are 2700 Apple Lisa Computers Buried In A Landfill?

Apple Lisa computer was released to satisfy Apple’s ambitions to build a mastered piece of hardware that would revolutionize the computing world, more precisely, to compete with IBM’s PC army. Born in the early eighties, it was Apple’s first shot in the market which had a GUI-enabled OS. The device had a Motorola 68000 processor clocked at 5 MHZ. It came with a 5-megabyte hard drive and supported 2 megabytes of RAM. It also had the Apple-designed 5.25-inch FileWare floppy diskette – called Twiggy – which was actually proposed to be implemented in Apple III.

For Steve Jobs, it was his vision to get something better than what previous Apple machines had offered at that time, having advanced features like cooperative multitasking and protected memory. This also marked the entry of Xerox PARC-inspired mouse into Apple’s ecosystem.

“Apple’s yet-to-be-announced Lisa 68000 network workstation is also widely rumored to have a mouse.” – InfoWorld, 1982

Launched on January 19, 1983, the technologically advanced Apple Lisa had a price tag of $9,995, around $24,000 in today’s time. Back then, buying the personal computer was more of a pipe dream than reality. The price tag does make sense as Apple had already spent $50 million in the R&D of Apple Lisa.

LISA stands for Local Integrated System Architecture, Apple officially stated. According to Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Mackintosh team, the acronym was actually a backronym deliberately formed to fit the name of Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan born in 1978.”Obviously, it was named for my daughter,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson during chat sessions for his biography.

In 1984, Apple released a modified variant Known as Lisa 2 with reduced RAM and 400K Sony Microfloppy instead of the Twiggy floppy drives. Price was slashed almost half of Lisa 1. But it wasn’t able to put sand on the remains of the commercially burnt Lisa 1. Another variant was released in 1985, called Mackintosh XL. The term Mackintosh had started echoing under Apple’s roofs by that time.

The product was discontinued in 1986 after the newly launched Mackintosh (not to confuse with Mackintosh XL) was fortunate to make a positive market presence and filling Apple’s bank accounts. With the help of Sun Remarketing, Apple prepared a burial ceremony for 2700 unsold Apple Lisa computers in 1989 at a landfill site in Logan, Utah. They did this to save some cash which they would to pay as a tax write-off.

“When Macintosh arrived in 1984 at $2495, the Lisa was doomed. In 1989, the last 2,700 Lisas were buried in a Utah landfill.” – Byte Magazine

An exorbitantly priced hardware had drowned into the ocean of value for money expectations of the buyers. It continued the failure legacy of the Apple III and Steve Jobs suffered the consequences of Lisa’s failure.

Check out the Apple Lisa commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W13kUWf5SAE

Read more about Apple:

• 20 Surprising Facts About Apple That You Probably Didn’t Know
• How An Apple Employee Said NO To Steve Jobs And Got Promoted Instead Of Getting Fired
• Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Turned Down A Job Offer From Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs’ First Business Was Selling Blue Box That Allowed Users To Make Free Calls Illegally