[MBCook]

While somewhat ridiculous, I kind of feel like they might’ve been better off if they were currently selling the Pentium 17.

Anyone can look at 17 and compare it to the number on their older computer (say Pentium 14) and know it’s better.

Apple is doing this right so far with the M chips, but they’re about to be on #3. We’ll see how long they stick with it. They have so far in phones.

[userbinator]

Apple is doing this right so far with the M chips

These?

    M1
    M1 Pro
    M1 Max
    M1 Ultra
    M2 Pro
    M2 Max

Besides the non-numerical suffixes being harder to sort, it still doesn't make it easy to compare performance between them at a glance. I will give them credit for not adding unnecessary "padding zeros", however.

[faeriechangling]

Apple is not doing it right.

You have the "MacBook Pro with M1 Pro" which makes my eyebrow twitch.

You also have the "M1 Max" which is lower grade than the "M1 Ultra". Despite it you know, being the MAX.

I will say that this branding while uncharacteristically sloppy for Apple, is better than bullshit like the "Intel Platinum i6-43065GF Extreme edition" which is simply incomprehensible to the untrained eye while the trained eyes roll in the back of their skulls.

[Macha]

The thing is that these companies have so many SKUs because they're trying to address so many market segments and so newer is not always automatically better. Then technology (and competition) advances at an uneven pace so you end up with some generations (2 -> 3, 6 -> 7, 10 -> 11) where the generational difference is "who cares", and some generations (9 -> 10, 11 -> 12) where basically the entire old generation is obsolete.

Apple is tackling an easier problem since they're focusing on subdivisions of the high margin premium consumer segment. But there's a world of difference between the €1400 base model m1 macbook air and the €550 windows machines the standard consumer here buys. A lot of Apple's target market looks at the €1400 MBA doing quite well against comparably priced windows machines (well as long as you aren't gaming, running legacy business applications, or actually in need of more than 8gb of RAM), and sees the €950 price difference to what people actually buy as irrelevant, but for e.g. my parents that pays for their next laptop in a decade too.

Once you're into that price sensitive market, you end up needing from a business imperative that smattering of SKUs, since the person selling a €600 laptop wants something they can point to as better than the €550 laptop and at that market, people are not buying €50 for lighter or more aesthetically appealing laptops. Then a sort of mirror happens at the high end since it's users buying CPUs directly and therefore more informed so it's not as easy to just make some tiers and extract maximum consumer surplus for the higher tiers.