Bargain for whom?

According to the article Lisa was a $50 million gamble.

I just read somewhere about the 2000 engineers Google took on for the Pixel phone from HTC. Keeping the lights on for the buildings they are in is a $50 million gamble, that's without paying them or allowing for inflation. But you get the idea, $50 million was cheap for the product compared to what hardware tech costs to develop today, particularly if it has an operating system to write from the ground up.

Incidentally, the threat from IBM mentioned in the article. Peanuts turned out to be the ill-fated PCjr that had good graphics and a bad price point for the home market. Popcorn turned out to be the first PC based lug-gable computer from IBM.