May 15, 1985: MacXL (Lisa) Officially Killed

by Chris Seibold May 15, 2011

The Mac XL was never a huge seller, the machine featured a display that made the graphics and letters looked stretched and, with dual floppy drives, didn't fit very well into the Macintosh design paradigm. So it wasn't very surprising when the poor selling model was discontinued.

The odd thing was that the Mac XL directly inspired the more accepted Macintoshes. Of course, the Mac XL had a secret: it had started out life as the Lisa. As the Lisa the product sold very poorly owing to a combination of factors, the most telling likely being the incredibly high price.

In an effort to get something out of the Lisa Apple rebadged the machine as the Mac XL in hopes of moving a few more machines. The plans didn't work and the machine that showed the creators of the Mac what not to do as well as showing them what they should do was officially abandoned on May 15, 1985.

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  • The Mac XL was a rebadged Lisa with MacWorks software installed to enable it to emulate the Mac. It also came with a small hardware kit to fix the screen aspect ratio, and therefore the Mac XL did have square pixels just like the Mac.

    The biggest downside was the processor speed. The original Mac had an 8 MHz 68000, the Lisa was 6. Still it did have a larger screen and decent hard drives well before the Mac had these.

    jasonnz had this to say on May 15, 2007 Posts: 1

  • I totally agree with this move by MacIntosh. Why do we have to suffer longer when you know the product you are trying to sell is not saleable. - GAR Labs

    Gar Labs had this to say on Oct 22, 2011 Posts: 3
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