Apple Lisa 2

Just a year after the original Lisa's disappointing debut, Apple returned with the Lisa 2, a quieter but meaningfully improved machine aimed at fixing the first model's most obvious flaws. Gone were the twin 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drives that had proven notoriously unreliable, replaced by a single, far sturdier 3.5-inch floppy drive, the same format soon to appear in the Macintosh. Apple also slashed the price dramatically, from nearly $10,000 down to well under half that, an implicit admission that the original Lisa's cost had been a major barrier to adoption. Under the hood the Lisa 2 was much the same machine: the same 5 MHz Motorola 68000, similar RAM ceilings, and the same graphical, mouse-driven Lisa OS that had impressed reviewers even as it failed to move units. Apple offered the Lisa 2 in a few configurations, including a version with an external 10 MB hard drive for users who needed more storage than a floppy could offer. Despite the improvements, the Lisa 2 arrived into a market that had already made up its mind: the original Lisa's reputation for high price and thin software support lingered, and the impending arrival of the Macintosh in January 1984, using much of the Lisa's own interface language at a fraction of the cost, effectively cannibalized any momentum the Lisa 2 might have built. Apple sold the Lisa 2 for barely a year before folding it into a new identity entirely. Still, the Lisa 2 mattered as a transitional machine, proving out the 3.5-inch floppy format that would become an industry standard for the rest of the decade, and demonstrating Apple's willingness to iterate quickly, even on a product that history would ultimately remember as a commercial misstep. It stands today as a rare and little-discussed link between the visionary but flawed original Lisa and the machine that would truly change computing forever.