Apple sharply discounted its Lisa computer, an ambitious machine that had introduced a graphical user interface, windows, icons, and a mouse to the commercial market a year earlier at a steep $9,995 price. Sales had badly lagged expectations against IBM's PC dominance. The Lisa's innovations, though commercially unsuccessful, directly informed the far cheaper and more successful Macintosh, released in January 1984.
The Lisa represented a staggering technical leap: a bitmapped display, drop-down menus, overlapping windows, and a mouse, concepts pioneered at Xerox PARC that Steve Jobs and Apple engineers had toured and absorbed in 1979. But its price, nearly $10,000 in 1983 dollars, put it far beyond reach for most consumers and even many businesses, and its slow performance frustrated early buyers.
Apple had bet heavily on Lisa as the company's future, but it sold only about 10,000 units in its first year against a projected 50,000 per month. By late November 1983, with a bloated inventory and mounting pressure, Apple cut prices dramatically in an attempt to salvage the project, but the damage to Lisa's reputation was largely done.
The real legacy of Lisa arrived weeks later: the Macintosh borrowed its interface concepts at a fraction of the cost, becoming the breakthrough product Lisa never was. Apple eventually buried thousands of unsold Lisa units in a Utah landfill in 1989, a strange and symbolic end for a machine that had quietly invented the future of personal computing.
Key people: Steve Jobs