[TheOtherHobbes]

A Wang word processor - as used by Stephen King - was around $12,000.

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.

[Joel_Mckay]

Stephen King famously did a lot of his work on typewriters, and often claimed it was part of his creative process. Not a great example, as publishing had odd ecosystems up until Aldus PageMaker (1985) revolutionized later Mac markets.

The Lisa was simply a delusional mismatch from the kits and retail consumer products Apple had sold up to that point.

No different from NVIDIA inferring a $12k RTX 6000 GPU is for gamers, when a $500 PS5 or $800 steam deck is also popular with home users. =3

"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." (Theodor Reik)

[musicale]

By 1986 the Mac Plus had 1MB of RAM (and the Mac had a faster CPU than the original Lisa), though with inferior multitasking and no MMU.

And high-end Macs really weren't (and aren't) cheap, though they could have provided good value over their lifetime. Mac II with a 40MB hard drive was $5369 in 1987, not including a keyboard ($229 for a 105 key model), video card ($499), or monitor ($1500+ for a nice Trinitron-based 13" AppleColor display.) Add more memory and an 80GB hard drive and you are back up in the $10000 range.

And that's not including Apple's best-selling LaserWriter printer (1988), priced at $6995.

But Apple does seem to have learned their lesson somewhat, introducing features on high-end "pro" systems and eventually migrating them downward, rather than splitting the product line into incompatible high-end (Apple III, Lisa) and low-end (Apple II, Mac) systems.

[Joel_Mckay]

In 1985, Bill gates team released Windows 1.01, and they were heavily supported by IBM vested interests. The 286 PC were around $3k dollars at the time with a 20MB to 30MB HDD.

The LaserWriter (1985) was $6995 or $20940 in 2025 US dollars. However, with Aldus it allowed true desktop publishing, and for a high-volume press-operator with plate-exposure machines it made a great deal of economic sense with transparency film. Not really meant for home offices for a few years yet, but offered something competitive with Ventura Publisher (PC version) and xerox laser printers.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially set out on a journey to make computers accessible to anyone. Yet Apple was a business like any other, and prone to the same political problems. There is a subtle relationship between price and value often lost in boardrooms. =3