Sinclair C5 to guide development. Gus Desbarats, the C5's industrial designer, attributes the vehicle's flawed concept to Sinclair operating in a "bubble" and believes that Sinclair "failed to understand the difference between a new market, computing, and a mature one, transport, where there were more benchmarks to compare against". He comments that the experience of working on the C5 convinced him of the need for industrial designers such as himself to get "involved early in the innovation process, shaping basic configurations, never again [being] satisfied to simply decorate a fundamentally bad idea". Sinclair himself said in 2005 that the C5 "was early
Clive Sinclair and £69.95 ready-built, by mail order. In February 1982 Timex obtained a licence to manufacture and market Sinclair's computers in the United States under the name Timex Sinclair. In April the ZX Spectrum was launched at £125 for the 16 kB RAM version and £175 for the 48 kB version. In March 1982 the company made an £8.55 million profit on turnover of £27.17 million, including £383,000 government grants for the TV80 flat-screen portable television. In 1982 Sinclair converted the Barker & Wadsworth mineral water bottling factory into the company's headquarters. (This was sold to Cambridgeshire County Council in December