The original list price of the Apple Lisa computer in 1983 was $9,995. That price applied to the Lisa model introduced with a five-megabyte hard drive.
Apple unveiled the Lisa on January 19, 1983, after beginning development in 1978. It was built around the Motorola 68000 processor and presented a window-and-mouse graphical user interface that made personal computing more approachable than command-line systems.
The price reflected ambitious hardware and software, including a 12-inch monochrome display, 1 MB of RAM, Lisa OS, office applications, and the original Lisa’s two FileWare, or “Twiggy,” floppy drives. In today’s money, the launch price is roughly equivalent to $32,300 in 2025.
The Lisa earned praise for its interface but sold poorly because it was expensive, had limited third-party software, and suffered reliability problems with its Twiggy drives. Apple introduced cheaper Lisa 2 models in 1984, but the Macintosh soon became the company’s more successful graphical-computing platform.