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In The 80s, An Entrepreneur Planned To Get Rich Reselling 7,000 Apple Lisa Computers. But The Tech Giant Recovered The Products, Destroyed Everything And Buried The Remains In A Dump. The Reason? To Erase One Of The Biggest Failures In Its History. Mystery, Million-Dollar Losses And An Extreme Decision By Apple!
When talking about Apple, the image of one of the most innovative and influential companies in the tech sector quickly comes to mind.
However, the company did not always have only successes in its trajectory.
In the 1980s, one of its products failed so spectacularly that the company made a radical decision: destroy thousands of units and bury them in a dump.
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This unusual episode involves the Apple Lisa computer and an entrepreneur who dreamed of profiting from these machines.
The Launch Of The Apple Lisa: Innovation And Failure
Launched in 1983, the Apple Lisa was one of the first personal computers to feature a graphical user interface.
The proposition was revolutionary for the time, but soon hit an insurmountable obstacle:
the exorbitant price of US$ 10,000.
In addition to the prohibitive cost, the Lisa also had technical limitations and faced strong competition.
The Macintosh itself, launched by Apple the following year, cost only US$ 2,500 and was much more appealing to consumers.
Moreover, IBM already dominated the market, making the Lisa’s life even more difficult.
As a result, sales were dismal, reaching about 30,000 units before the project was abandoned.
The Opportunity That Became A Nightmare
In 1985, just two years after the launch, Apple decided to discontinue the production of the Lisa, ending up with a large stockpile of 7,000 units.
At this moment, Bob Cook entered the scene, an entrepreneur who saw an opportunity in the situation.
Cook received a proposal to buy these units and saw the possibility of turning them into marketable products.
Instead of simply reselling the old computers, he planned to modernize the devices, updating the operating system and improving their configuration.
An Ambitious Revitalization Plan
Faced with the low popularity of the Lisa, Cook decided to invest heavily to make it more appealing.
His project involved:
- Installing an operating system based on Macintosh;
- Enhancing the floppy disk drive;
- Increasing the RAM;
- Adding a higher-capacity hard drive.
In total, the entrepreneur spent about US$ 200,000 to carry out these improvements.
The plan was to sell the updated computers at a more affordable price, making them competitive in the technology market at the time.
Apple Intervenes And Buries Thousands Of Computers
Before Cook could put his strategy into practice, Apple reclaimed all the units of the Lisa.
According to The Verge, the company had a clause in the contract that gave it the right to request the computers back at any time — and that’s exactly what it did in 1989.
However, the bigger surprise came later: Apple destroyed the 7,000 computers and buried the remains in a dump in Logan, Utah.
The official justification for this drastic action was a strategic financial decision.
According to records from the time, the company obtained a tax deduction of US$ 34 for every US$ 100 of depreciated value, as well as avoided the costs of technical support for an already obsolete product.
An Attempt To Erase The Past?
Bob Cook, however, believed in a different version of events.
To him, Apple simply wanted to eliminate any trace of the Lisa’s failure, preventing future generations from remembering the fiasco.
After all, the company was already consolidating itself as a technology icon and did not want to carry such an obvious mistake in its history.
How Many Computers Were Actually Buried?
To this day, there are doubts about the exact number of units that were discarded.
Some reports suggest that only 2,700 computers were actually buried, while the remainder may have been sold before Apple took action.
The lack of official records fuels speculation about the fate of some of these machines.
Did Bob Cook manage to sell some units before Apple intervened?
If so, Apple Lisa units may be hidden in private collections around the world.
The Legacy Of The Lisa And Its Historical Value
Although it was a commercial failure, the Apple Lisa represented a major technological advancement.
The computer was pioneering in offering a graphical interface that, years later, would become the industry standard.
The concept developed by Apple in the Lisa directly influenced the evolution of operating systems, including macOS and even Windows.
Nowadays, finding a functioning Apple Lisa is a true challenge.
The few remaining models are rare and valuable pieces for collectors, potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The episode involving its destruction and burial only heightened the fascination surrounding this story.
The case of the Lisa shows how even technology giants can fail — and sometimes, try to erase the traces of those failures. But in the world of the internet, stories like this never completely disappear.
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