Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s burial

The Macintosh SE/30 was new the same year Apple bulldozed Bob's old (would be) Lisa Professional stock: 1989. At this point they are both running variations of System 6 and (from this article) it sounds like Sun Remarketing is selling to a lot of businesses, the market Apple wants to grow. It's easy for me to see the Lisa Pro as real competition for the SE/30, they might be far apart in terms of hardware but to customers they probably looked very similar, particularly customers focused on word processing and spreadsheets.

From then on, it seemed like Apple was selling that machine forever. That SE/30 was improved a bit and branded the Classic II in 1991, the next year old stock was re-branded as the Performa 200 and they kept on selling that thing, AFAICT, until they sold them all. I remember seeing them in Sears as late as 1994 sitting right next to PowerPC Performa models.

I was familiar with the story of the Lisa, but hearing from Bob Cook about Sun Remarketing and all the work they did to support the deprecated Lisas (which they rebranded as the Lisa Professional) was super interesting.

If you just want to watch the bit about the Lisa Professional, it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjbNWgsDt8&t=818s

unpopular truth -- around the time of the iMac products, well-before iPhone, Steve Jobs was building iTunes with huge guile on how to take record company revenue.. and some indie Mac devs were building a fun music player. Steve personally visited their house somewhere, with security around him, and told them "you have no chance" to make this a product. .. out of college guys making something fun. The issue was .. iTunes is the Mac OS music player - end of statement. (MSFT drama on this exact topic was fresh in the waters)

source-- mac dev at the time

I remember seeing Sun Remarketing ads in the late 1980s and wondering how they got all those Lisa computers to sell. It's great getting to see and hear the man behind the company.