[code_sterling]

I was just speaking to one of my devs about this today. Steve Jobs' turned Apple around by removing choice. You had a Consumer and Pro category and they each had a laptop and a desktop. The new Apple is slowly drifting into Dell territory, where I have too many options. It becomes the Netflix problem where I find myself having too many options, so I browse the offerings, and before I decide, fall asleep.

[wiredfool]

Steve Jobs got rid of a lot of stupid choices in the Mac line, but he was not anti choice.

At one point, the ipod lineup went from about $50 to $500 in $25-$50 increments. Every little increment was just that much better, in a way that made it very easy to spend a few more bucks. This one has more space, that one is a little bigger and has a screen, that one is a ton bigger an can play videos, this one has more storage than you'd ever imagine.

The ios lineup looked like that a few years back, between the ipod Touch, carrier subsidies for phones, and the new at the time ipads. The declining subsidies has cut off the 0$ upfront low end, but they're extending up with the pro.

My feeling on the laptops is that the Air is not long for this world (which sucks, cause I really like mine), and the model confusion now is essentially a transition state because they can't make all the engineering happen in one year. At some point, Apple is going to manage to make all of their laptops essentially iPads of different sizes, with attached keyboards.

(Why they can't do a bigger one with a real keyboard, days of battery life, and a monster processor is left to the imagination)

[simonh]

I think the problem is they're in a transitional phase right now. Retina displays aren't ubiquitous yet and are introducing an extra axis of differentiation on the one hand, while the new ultralight Macbook is the first example of a step change in form factors. They're a long way from PC manufacturers where the main distinction between two models can be as trivial as the audio chip and speaker specs.