The launch of the popular Apple Lisa was a disaster. Steve Jobs demanded a design so compact that without proper ventilation, the motherboard would overheat, causing constant crashes and reboots. It also had no shortage of memory errors and its graphical interface would put off any novice. Paying $9,995 in 1983 for something like thisaround 30,000 dollars today, did not seem like a perfect plan in the face of an IBM which established itself with a PC – the 5150, equipped with an Intel 8088 microprocessor – which shaped modern domestic computing.
Yes, Apple solved the problem a year later, with its first Macintosh. All the marketing investments went to him. But the damage was done. What did you do with thousands of pieces of ready-to-sell gear that no one wanted to buy? Put them away and forget them. This is where one person comes in, Bob Cook, a salesman specializing in Apple products, founder and president of Sun Remarketing, who liked to accumulate stocks of what no one else had: up to 7,000 devices with effect of lever.
Bob Cook’s 3,000 Apple IIIs
Bob Cook has always been, above all, an Apple enthusiast. Already in the 1980s, he had spent years buying up all the Apple III stock he could find at rock-bottom prices. In front of every retailer who didn’t know what to do, There, Bob was ready to sign a sale that would save the furniture. He managed to accumulate nearly 3,500 Apple IIIs by buying back all the surpluses accumulated by Apple itself. Apple actually allowed him to pay them in several installments.
But this recycler came across a new reality: the Lisa apple. If the previous model had not been very successful, this new model, the first with a mouse, was piling up in warehouses with no possible future. Up to 7,000 Lisas died without owners after management changes in the company. Steve Jobs was still confident in the future of this equipment and new expansion options and peripherals were plannedbut they finally gave up.
In fact, they were limited to providing support to Bob as a dealer and allowing him to implement modifications and improvements on equipment that arrived with factory defects. For an unfiltered amount, an agreement was reached whereby Apple facilitated the marketing of these thousands of devices by Bob Cook’s company. and provide specialized support like a modern RosselliMac could.
And Bob’s company invested $200,000 in research and development to improve this flawed piece of equipment into what it called “Lisa Professional,” or a sort of two-zero version with significant structural improvements. . Until September 1989, when Apple changed its mind and demanded the return of the equipment. With the rest of the stock he had left, his fate would be different.
It is then that begins a legal journey already magnificently documented by The Verge in its documentary ‘Lisa: the sabotage of Steve Jobs and the secret burial of Apple’ where the second death of a team that was believed to be forgotten. . And what happened to the gigantic warehouse full of Apple Lisas and Apple IIIs? A truck paid for by Apple showed up at the gates to collect said equipment. The workers didn’t leave a single one behind.
Bob didn’t want to face the Cupertino legal team, he didn’t understand what he had done wrong. But it was clear that Apple wanted to close a chapter by erasing a page of its history: The marketing of defective equipment handled by third parties did not correspond to the image of a brand which claims strict safety controls and tests before putting anything on sale. Lisa’s end is what many already know: they ended up in a landfill in Logan, Utah, crushed and buried, with no one able to save them from such a disastrous fate.
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