It's a shame they abandoned it so quickly for the Mac, and let that project suck away all the air in the room, or allowed a competing project like that at all i

It's a shame they abandoned it so quickly for the Mac, and let that project suck away all the air in the room, or allowed a competing project like that at all instead of concentrating efforts. The Mac stole from the Lisa but just aesthetic / UX aspects, and produced something that didn't grow well over the years... no memory protection, single tasking, etc. Things that impacted them very badly in the late 80s and into the 90s when customers wanted/expected these things and System 7 did not cut it. Lisa really was the superior platform in many ways and it really would have come down to finding a way to get prices lower through economies of scale. Another couple years and the 68k and supporting chips and RAM were way cheaper and you could make a fairly beefy machine in that class for pretty cheap (as Tramiel showed with the Atari ST.)