Macintosh XL

By early 1985 Apple had a warehouse problem. Unsold Lisa 2 machines were sitting on pallets while the Macintosh, barely a year old, was doing the thing the Lisa never managed and selling. The Mac also couldn't match what those pallets held: a 12-inch screen, an internal hard disk, memory past 512K, real multitasking. So Apple relabelled them. The Lisa 2/10, a Lisa 2 with a 10 MB internal drive, became the Macintosh XL, and an emulation layer called MacWorks let it boot something close enough to a Macintosh to run Mac software. Buyers got the bigger screen, the hard drive the Macintosh 128K didn't have, and memory expandable to 1 MB, all running real Mac applications. The catch showed up in use. MacWorks was a single-tasking approximation of System software, missing the polish and the clean compatibility that made the 128K feel like one coherent machine, and the older Lisa hardware underneath was slower and dearer than the Mac people actually wanted. Apple cut the price again. It never shook the sense of being old stock in a new box, and when the supply of Lisa parts ran out a few months later Apple stopped making it. That was the end of the Lisa line, and a strange end at that. The XL is the only Macintosh Apple ever shipped that was really a Lisa wearing a different badge. Collectors chase it for exactly that reason, and it keeps turning up in Apple histories as a company improvising its way out of an expensive mistake while the thing that saved it sold quietly on the next shelf over.