Computers: The Year of the Mouse

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Apple is aiming Lisa at the nation's 30 million professionals, managers and administrative executives. Much is riding on the success of the machine, both for Apple, which invested $50 million and three years in the project, and for its harddriving, high-strung chairman, Steven Jobs. At the official unveiling of the new computer last week, Jobs was able to announce to his stockholders a 73% increase in quarterly profits on sales of $214 million. That increase was due almost entirely to the continued high sales of the durable Apple II (750,000 sold since its introduction six years ago; 45,000 in the month of December at its alltime-low list price of $1,330), a machine that is showing its age. The company discontinued manufacture of the Apple II last week and introduced an enhanced version called the Apple IIe, priced at $1,395, which its assembly plant in Carrollton, Texas, is turning out at the rate of one every 30 seconds. (The original Apple was a short-lived machine aimed at hobbyists, and only 600 were built.) The firm's other computer, the Apple III, never quite caught on. It suffered a disastrous launching (the first 14,000 had to be recalled for retooling) and then was outsold by International Business Machines' belated entry into the desktop market, the IBM Personal Computer.

Apple, setting out to prove that it could build a better personal computer than IBM or anyone else, seems to have made its point with Lisa. The new machine has some flaws: no color, a balky printer, a sluggish word processor, a few tricky hurdles in a new planning and scheduling program. But nothing on the market, including the IBM PC, compares with the new machine. Lisa pays imaginative court to details: when a knotty task is in progress, the machine signals that the ensuing work will take some time by displaying a little hourglass. When the "off" button is pushed before work on the screen has been properly stored, the machine automatically files loose documents and stows away relevant data before shutting itself off. Headlines and labels can be set in any of a dozen typefaces, then enlarged or shrunk with a flick of the mouse. Moreover, nearly all the built-in software is "integrated," that is, numbers, words and pictures can be easily transferred among the charts, graphs, memos and computations on the screen. Several companies offer software that is more or less integrated, but none matches the ease of use of Lisa and its mouse.