Apple Lisa 2

A year on from the Lisa's flop, Apple tried again. The Lisa 2 fixed the most visible problems and said little about it. Out went the twin 5.25-inch Twiggy drives, which had earned a reputation for eating disks, and in went a single 3.5-inch floppy, the format the Macintosh would carry to market weeks later. The price fell from nearly $10,000 to well under half that, which Apple never called an apology though it read like one. Underneath, little had changed. Same 5 MHz 68000, similar memory ceilings, same mouse-driven Lisa OS that reviewers had admired while buyers ignored it. You could order the machine with an external 10 MB hard drive if a floppy wasn't enough. None of it landed. The original Lisa's reputation for costing too much and running too little software had already set, and then the Macintosh arrived in January 1984 speaking most of the Lisa's own interface language for a fraction of the money. Apple sold the Lisa 2 for barely a year before absorbing it into another product entirely. What the machine did prove was the 3.5-inch floppy, which became the industry's default storage for the next fifteen years, and a company willing to revise a product fast even after writing it off. Collectors treat the Lisa 2 as the bridge between those two machines, which is more attention than it got when Apple was selling it.