Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial | FULL DOCUMENTARY

Sabotage, hired goons, and a landfill in Utah: this is a story about the life, death, and afterlife of Apple’s most pioneering flop, the Lisa computer. How it inspired generations of computers to follow; how Steve Jobs championed it, then turned against it; and how an outsider gave it another chance…before Apple closed the door on the Lisa forever. #apple #documentary #film

0:00 Intro
2:04 Chapter 1: Silicon Valley
4:59 Chapter 2: The Outsider
6:57 Chapter 3: Lisa
10:21 Chapter 4: Sabotage
13:38 Chapter 5: The Lisa Professional
19:13 Chapter 6: The Burial
23:08 Chapter 7: The Motives
25:09 Final location of Lisas and Steve's Return
27:04 Sun Remarketing final days

[TheVerge]

What other mysteries or forgotten stories in tech should we look into?

[DominicGo]

i want more tech documentaries!! the more obscure, the better

[EmperorKonstantine]

Steve was a grown up Toy Child with computers where as Wozniak was the Wizard of Apple Technology, both had their ups and downs. Running a expanding business is not easy when you’re not fully up to speed. I think Steve was going way above his head in most instances. Beyond his scope and experience. And the Guy that saved all those computers (majority of Apple Lisa’s) from going to land fill in my consideration and opinion is a saviour and legend beyond the scope of the name. He surely deserved the recognition he got.

[phyzix_phyzix]

What actually happened was the start of planned obsolescence. People were buying the used Lisas and cutting into the Macintosh market. They needed to get rid of the Lisa so they could regain those sales.

[ReginaldVandeVelde]

Love such documentaries! Hats off for all the research, finding these people, and actually have them on camera to tell the story, amazing.

[DominicGo]

15:51 it’s crazy that they were able to run a different OS on the Lisa.

They didn’t have access to the docs/hardware schematics, source code, and modern debugging/decompilation tools, and yet somehow it was able to run software that was made to run on a mac.

if Apple didn’t destroy those Lisa’s, I’m sure tech hobbyists would have ported UNIX to it.

i want to hear more about the software/hardware mods they made for the Lisa!

[blushslice]

I appreciate people being honest about Steve’s horrible management skills

[KeithGroover]

I bet Steve Wozniak's soul died when he heard that his company was destroying computers because nerds were tinkering on it. What a tragedy.

[martyzielinski]

A more fundamental motive for doing this is that each rejuvenated Lisa represents one fewer sale of a new Mac. The Lisas had effectively become competitors against their newest models.

[SaschaPallenberg]

Oh there it is. I was so looking forward to this one. Thanks to the whole team that was involved in this timeless piece

[eefm]

The production is amazing. The landfill takes look incredible, all the snow, the mountains behind, the cloudy atmosphere, if I didn't know it was a landfill I'd like to go there lol

Loved the story, the research, the magazines and the aged ads, the old photos, I was hooked-up for the entirety of the video.

This is how documentaries should be, informative, interesting, eye-catching and most importantly, not boring.

[rayskinner]

I love mini tech docs like this. Please keep them coming, Verge. A+ stuff.

[sjgrall]

Also, to quote this, "all the missteps, pettiness, politics, reverse decisions. It's hard to imagine modern Apple flailing like If Apple could keep the details of the Lisa disposal mostly secret for all those years, who is to say there aren't other secrets the masses do not know?

[MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive]

8:15 According to Lisa Brennan-Jobs's autobiography _Small Fry, _ after a lifetime of denial Steve Jobs didn't admit that he named the computer after her until she was 27 years old and they were vacationing as guests at Bono's Mediterranean Villa.

Bono asked Steve "So was the Lisa computer named after her?" and Steve _hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. "Yeah it was, " he said._

She thought _"It was as if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets."_

By her own words _"my father began on the team working for it, but then started working against it, competing against it on the Mac team. The Lisa computer was discontinued, the three thousand unsold computers later buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah."_ Despite that, Steve Jobs would get contradictorily defensive when others would bring up the Lisa computer and state or imply it was a failure. He would say things like _It was too ahead of its time. Too expensive and luxurious. People didn't appreciate her the way she deserved._ Which I read as a perfect metaphor for the Lisa human.

[KOTYAR]

Finally a work which doesn't make Verge look like a bad joke. Amazing journalism.

[OliverHeady]

I'm a student at Utah State, and I've been to that dump several times. I had no idea that such a crazy piece of history is buried there! Thank you for this story and your incredible reporting 😄

[zimfan]

Apple's business model now is planned obsolescence and inability to do repairs or upgrades. Truly of reflection of Jobs' malevolence! Great documentary.

[OsoDeAnteojos]

What a great documentary. Please make more like this!

[pctrashtalk]

Where I used to work one of our employees had left and got a job selling apples. He stopped buy with the new Lisa and gave us a demo. Everyone liked it but were pretty shocked at the price. We had a Apple II but later bought a IBM PC. When the MAC came out I was surprised that it has no expansion slots like the Apple II and IBM PC. I did buy a Apple IIe myself later but after that never bought another Apple. They just seemed to be overpriced for what you got.

[MrCarzo]

Dope documentary. Crazy how a company that touts how "eco-friendly" they are is constantly proven to put roadblocks in front of used equipment, even decades ago.