The machine's hardware consisted of a 9 inch (229 mm) black-and-white monitor, a single 3½ inch 256 KB floppy disk drive and an IBM Selectric-compatible keyboard.
The most common variants are LH 2.2, which uses an Intel 8049 (MCS-48) microcontroller, and usually a 4 kB programme memory, and LH 2.4, which uses a Siemens 80535 microcontroller (a variant of Intel's 8051/MCS-51 architecture) and 32 kB programme memory based on the 27C256 chip.
Dubbed "Wicked Fast" by the Product Manager, Frank Casanova - who came to Apple from Apollo Computer in Boston, Massachusetts where the Boston term "wicked" was commonly used to define anything extreme - the system ran at a clock rate of a then-impressive 40 megahertz, had 32 KB of Level 2 cache, six NuBus slots and included a number of proprietary ASICs and coprocessors designed to speed up the machine further.
His first assigned job was to write some programs to demonstrate the capabilities of the new 8 kB ROM and 16 kB RAM expansion for the ZX80.
Arie Slob, writing for the Windows-help.net newsletter in March 2003, noted that the size of the update list had exceeded 400KB, which caused delays of more than a minute for dial-up users.