In 1979 Apple begins work on "Sara", the code name for what will be the Apple III.
The Apple III was announced May 19, 1980, during the National Computer Conference (NCC) in Anaheim California.
Price ranges from US$4500 to US$8000.
In the fall of 1980 Apple ships the first Apple III units in limited quantity.
It ran a Synertek 6502A processor running a new operating system named Apple SOS at 2 MHz, twice as fast as the Apple II. It had a maximum of 128k of RAM, twice the memory of an Apple II.
It was also the first Apple computer to have a built-in floppy drive, a Shugart 143k 5.25" disk drive.
It could have two additional peripherals added via its two serial ports, and had 4 internal expansion slots that were compatible with Apple II cards. But Steve Jobs, who supervised the project gave ridiculous demands to the development team including dimensions that were too small to fit all the components, and no cooling fan. The result was that the team had to cram the components in allowing little or no ventilation. Since there was no fan to cool the overheating, the chips expanded and eventually popped out of the machine, killing it.
After replacing 14,000 bad IIIs, a newly revised Apple III, with 256k RAM and the option of adding a 5MB ProFile hard drive for $3495, was released late in the fall of 1981.
In December 1983, Apple introduces the redesigned Apple III as the Apple III+, for US$3000. It had 256k RAM, a working logic board with built-in clock, improved peripheral ports with standard DB-25 connectors, a modified slot for easier card installation, and Apple SOS 1.3.
Nevertheless, the III had a very bad reputation by this time and it was inevitably "too little, too late".
The Apple III was retired on April 24, 1984 with only 65,000 units sold in total.