The thing you have to keep in mind is that the Macintosh didn't actually come after Lisa, but instead they were developed contemporaneously within Apple. In fact, Steve Jobs was quoted in early 1983 saying something like "Macintosh will be the future of Apple," when the Mac was still a year away from release.
And when you look at the even bigger picture within Apple, you see that they were developing something like 4 computers all around the same time: the Apple III, the Apple IIe, Lisa, and Macintosh!
Yes and no.
Some parts of the Mac depended on the Lisa,
LisaGraf became QuickDraw for example. Off the top of my head this is why LOS 2.0 is so slow, the Pascal based LisaGraf was rewritten for 3.x in assembly and then moved to the Mac and more stuff got added to it. A lot of this history can be found on
folklore.org.For sure the Apple ][ line is what paid the bills in that era. It kept Apple Computer, Inc. up and running, and as an homage to the "Apple ][ Forever" battle cry, Apple gave its fans the IIgs as its last incarnation, or perhaps a final thank you.
The Mac was supposed to be more like the Canon Cat or like the ][ - a text machine running on a 6809, but then turned graphical. But then Steve got kicked off the Lisa team and went and knocked off Jef Raskin and took over and started competing with the Lisa team. The irony being that Raskin pushed Jobs to visit Xerox PARC, and then got kicked out of his own project to have it replaced by something that was inspired by his efforts to point to a better way.
I would conjecture that the
pirate flag incident and "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" bit is about the Lisa and a reminder to not become a large group like the Lisa's, and not IBM.
In that era there were many fiefdoms in Apple and no central product vision. After Steve learned his lessons with NeXT, he simplified Apple's product line to a 4 square. (home vs pro, portable vs desktop); now it's back to the same mess - too many products, some overlapping and competing with others.
Had the Lisa been released in say 1989 when RAM prices were much cheaper, it would have been far more successful, and the Mac wouldn't have existed, and we would have seen a Lisa II in color. There are plans for a codename "
Whopper" update to the Lisa, which did not have color, but it did mention addressing the square pixels, but ofc it was killed off.