Even when development started in summer '79 it took twice as long as Apple expected, not only because they had to get rid of Jobs first. So LISA wasn't launched earlier than 1983 with 1Mb RAM for almost U$D 10K. The project was a $50 million investment for Apple Inc., and kept losses low since it sold almost 5K units annually. After 27 months it was in-house competition that buried the Lisa computers, litterally. In the end it was a zero sum game for Apple, but a huge step for modern graphic user-interfaces and more personal computers.