An Apple Lisa, or 43 iPads?

Apple's groundbreaking (and incredibly expensive) Lisa, circa 1983.

Adjusting figures for inflation, an American who could afford an Apple Lisa (a forerunner to the Mac) in 1983, the year before the first Apple Macintosh came out, would now be able to buy 43 iPads for the same money.

Who wants 43 iPads? A hospital, maybe. iPads are already popular with US physicians: 20 per cent plan to purchase them, and another 60 per cent are considering it.

The Apple Lisa cost US$9995 on release – in today's money, that comes to US21,744.85 (about NZ$30,512). An Apple Portable, the original brick-outhouse Apple 'laptop' would set you back US$11,358.59 in today's money, a Newton Message Pad US$1048.47, and the first iPod US$488.46 (the iPad came out on April 3rd in the States for US$499 for the cheapest version).

Of course, these original US prices were higher still by the time the Apple products got to New Zealand – add freight and reseller margins.

The graphic and original story about Apple's prices adjusted for today's inflation is from Social Media Graphics.

But another way to look at it is in terms of processing power. An iPad has a 1GHz Apple A4 CPU; the Lisa had a 5MHz Motorola 68000 CPU.

A Gigahertz is one billion hertz (cycles per second), and a Megahertz is one million cycles per second. So I think that makes an iPad about 200 times more powerful for a twenty-second of the price. Or for the same price, using an iPad processor as the example, now you can buy 4400 times the processing power for the same cost as that Apple Lisa.

Of course, an iPad is also a lot more portable than a Lisa.

The iPad comes with 16GB, or 32GB or 64GB of flash memory. The Lisa came with storage in the form of two Apple FileWare 5¼-inch double-sided floppy disk drives with capacities of approximately 871 kilobytes each, so about 1.4MB of tortuously slow storage combined.

The smallest (16GB) iPad has 11,428 times more storage on board.

An optional external 5MB Apple ProFile hard drive was available for big-spending Lisa owners. Even so, the smallest iPad has 3200 times more space available.

(With the introduction of the later Lisa 2, a 10MB internal proprietary hard disk manufactured by Apple was available.)

The Lisa had a 12-inch black-and-white (that's black and white – not even greys!) cathode-ray monitor displaying 720x364 pixels; the iPad has a smaller 9.7-inch monitor, sure, but it's a full-colour showing 1024x768 pixels in gorgeous backlit LED.

Of course, the Lisa was blitzed once Apple released the Macintosh in 1984 – this machine benefited from Steve Jobs' full attention once he'd moved on (or been pushed away) from the Lisa project. The first Macintosh was 1.5 times faster than the Lisa with a blazing 7.89MHz CPU. It was also cheaper and had a better implementation of the Graphic User Interface commercially debuted by the Lisa, in turn based on Xerox PARC ideas.

That NZ$30,512 for that Apple Lisa would now get you almost 18 MacBooks, or 15x13-inch MacBook Pros or 21.5 inch iMacs, or 10x 15-inch MacBook Pros or Core 2 Duo 27-inch iMacs, or nearly seven Mac Pros (although Pros come without monitors). All these Macs are vastly more powerful with way, way more storage and RAM than that original Lisa.

And I'm sure commenters will do the maths and supply figures for Dells, HPs and whatever. Go to it – but try to match specs as well as prices.

Back in 1990, when I bought my first hard drive, it was NZ$1200 for a 20mb device that totally revolutionised my work and output. My first HP inkjet cost over $2000 (and it was black and white only – I had to get a serious loan to pay for it).

Now for $1200 I could get a great external Elite Pro 1.5TB drive (retail) or nearly two very good LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk 2TB (retail, and without shopping around). So where I once paid $60 dollars per megabyte, even with the expensive Elite drive I'm only paying 9¢ for a Gigabyte (1000MBs). That's quite a big change, which sounds marvellous until you take fairly astronomical file and application code-bloat into account.

My first 1MB RAM was $1200. Now, for that, I could get between 6 and 12GBs RAM even at Apple prices, in 2GB SIMM modules. Say I got 8GB for $1200, that would be NZ15¢ per megabyte – quite a saving on that $1200 per megabyte from 20 years ago.

The original iPod (c2001) also makes for an interesting comparison. For US$488.46 (about NZ$685) you got 5GBs of storage on a mechanical hard drive. That could store 1000 MP3s. Contrast that with a current 4GB shuffle for NZ$129. That also fits about a 1000 songs (the AAC format is a little more space-efficient than MP3). You store those songs for NZ13¢ each, compared to 69¢ each originally, except a shuffle is tiny and flash-based. Solid-state, that makes it a lot more robust in everyday use than that original, fat-looking iPod.

Or go by cost: $685 today would get you a 160GB iPod Classic. Actually, you'd have $256 change (it's a steal at NZ$429). That's storage for 40,000 songs at ten songs for a cent.

A closer price comparison would be an iPod touch, basically an iPhone without the phone and GPS, which means it still has access to most of the other apps and games, video etc. It's flash based, unlike the iPod classic. NZ$699 gets you a 64GB touch, or nearly 140 times the storage of the original iPod for just $14 more. If you fill it with 14,000 songs, you're paying .05¢ per song to store them.

Apple may charge a price premium of up to 20 per cent over other brands, but we're still happy for what we get. And we get a hell of lot more for our money, these days.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com