The future of Apple's Lisa is now clear - it's being dropped in favour of the Macintosh.

Lisa was launched in 1983 and brought the now fashionable windows, icons and mice into public view for the first time, but sales of the machine have been very low, largely because of its high price and lack of software.

Apple reduced Lisa's price to £4,000 last year but is now to replace it with a 512K Mac with a 20Mb hard disk. A range of peripherals designed to enchance the Macintosh's power and business image will be made available later this year.

With no radically new machine, and GEM and Atari posing a threat, Apple has to make the machine more attractive than GEM-based systems.

The 4th Mational Apple User Exhibition (May 9 1985 - May 11 1985) will see demonstrations of Mac networked with Appletalk driving laser printers via Laserwriter. Interest among UK software houses is high: Lotus will be showing Jazz (due for release May 27 1985), Blyth Software will launch a networked Omnis 3, Pace is developing a comms package and Psion has a Macintosh version of its Chess.