A documentary will tell the story of Apple's Lisa in early 2020

By Oliver Haslam
published

Apple Lisa
Apple Lisa (Image credit: Auction Team Breker)

What you need to know

  • The Apple Lisa was an important computer for Apple.
  • A new documentary, titled "Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa" will air next year.
  • A new trailer for the documentary has been releaed.

Apple's Lisa launched in 1983 and cost huge sums of money – around $25,000 in today's money – that ultimately nobody wanted to pay. It was canceled in 1986 and was one of Apple's biggest flops to date. And a new documentary will tell its story when it arrives next year. Titled "Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa," the documentary has a new trailer out, too.

The new trailer (via Cult of Mac) is still a pretty rough edit of what we can expect to see when the documentary is ready in early 2020. The man behind it, computer historian David Geelish, says that the video will have more than a dozen interviews in it including one with former Apple CEO John Sculley. That could be an interesting watch given his relationship with Steve Jobs who was ultimately kicked off the Lisa team.

I can't wait for the documentary to be ready to go. It's been funded via Kickstarter and was originally expected to arrive in the fall of 2019. That obviously didn't happen, with an early 2020 launch now the target.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.