[lizknope]

Product names make no sense. Some web sites make a "product selection tool" where you answer a bunch of questions and it tries to direct you to models that will suit your needs.

I was recently buying a Seasonic power supply. What is the difference between Prime, Vertex, Focus, or Core series? Then there is Prime TX, Prime PX, Prime GX. I have no idea what all this is. I ended up just picking something in the 800W range with the modular power outputs that I needed.

[kwanbix]

I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma: When you go to buy toothpaste, like Colgate or most brands, you're bombarded with so many options. It gets worse when you read the labels—everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps. It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

[JohnBooty]

When you see this, particularly on supermarket shelves, this is a deliberate attempt to crowd out other brands.

You're focusing on the micro ("WTF is each one of these ridiculous micro variations?") and not on the macro (Colgate is absolutely dominating that aisle, and fully 75% of the toothpaste choices are Colgate while Crest and Aquafresh fight over the scraps)

    It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

This is also by design, more or less. If you give up and "just grab one" you're pretty likely to pick a Colgate, since that represents 75% of the options available and it's also one of the oldest and therefore most "trusted" brands. You can't exactly go wrong with a Colgate, right?

Of course some people will rebel, and say "screw Colgate" and pick some other brand, and some people will just literally pick the cheapest option no matter what.

But again, if I'm Colgate or whatever their parent company? I absolutely love the way that toothpaste aisle looks. 75% of it is Colgate Red and I bet the sales figures hew pretty closely to that.

[kwanbix]

I imagine it works if they are still doing it, but I think is worst. As soon as a brand comes with simpler naming, it can steal your customers.

[rs999gti]

> I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma

It's called Tyranny of Choice - https://longevity.stanford.edu/the-tyranny-of-choice/

> Too many options can decrease the likelihood of making any decision at all

[kwanbix]

Good to know, thanks! :)

[legitster]

I legit use the term "Toothpaste Shopping" to describe any miserably complex shopping experience.

(Although ironically, toothpaste shopping is quite easy once you know the correct answer is "the cheapest brand at the store that has fluoride in it")

[extraduder_ire]

Unless you're looking for some other feature. Once I learned what novamin was, I started getting a toothpaste with that in it. I think only two such brands exist.

[cam_l]

>everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps

Whenever I find marketing copy like this, I use it to filter out the whole company's product lines. This heuristic never fails, because I don't even know what I am missing out on.

[yndoendo]

This is dependent on your filter.

I try not to buy big brand / mega corporate products. No Colgate or Crest and both own a number of the less known brands, those are out. This leads to only one or two options to choose from.

This is why I look at products manufacture not just their name.

I would really like website like https://isitbigbeer.com/ to help filter out all products and brands that hide behind multi-naming schemas.

[chrismcb]

Toothpaste shopping is easy. I pick the one brand that has a convenient non tube toothpaste (actually there are two, but I didn't like the taste of one) I thing I didn't understand is there are only about 6 of the non tube options and 1000 of the tubes. Do people really like to roll their toothpaste out of a tube?

[ChiefNotAClue]

Seasonic's product lines are relatively simple to figure out. They haven't changed in years, except with the addition of the Vertex line. At the very least, they're easier to understand than other power supply manufacturers.

Product Lines: Core (Budget) < Focus (Mid) < Vertex (Mid-High) < Prime (High), in terms of quality and features.

80Plus Efficiency: GX (Gold) < PX (Platinum) < TX (Titanium)

This is true across all of their product lines.

[imiric]

> Product names make no sense.

Why should they? Every company has different priorities, and it's on you as a consumer to get familiar with each company's product line before making a purchase.

Would you prefer it if all products were named "<company name> <thing>"? So in your PSU example, "Seasonic PSU"? Of course not, you would like to have more detail than that. So how about "Seasonic PSU 800W modular"? OK, that's better, but what if other consumers are interested in different product criteria? Should we just cram them all in the product name like sellers on Amazon do? That wouldn't be right either. So the best approach then is to segment your product line according to some criteria, and give different segments arbitrary names. This way customers can know what to expect, and which segment to focus on. It's important to keep this consistent, otherwise it leads to confusion, but in general it works fine IMO. I would rather have to choose between Seasonic Prime TX, Prime PX, etc., than Seasonic Pro, Pro Max, etc.

[vel0city]

That's the thing though. I don't really want to have to know whether the Seasonic Prime PX is the same tier as the Corsair RM or the RMx or the RMe or the HX. None of those names gives me any indication of what the product actually is, and from a quick glance the letters don't seem to even directly stand for any particular feature.

Its one thing to have say a Seasonic 800M versus just the Seasonic 800 and know the "m" means its modular. What does it even mean for it to be PRIME TX versus a FOCUS GX or GM or then suddenly dropping the noun part and going straight to G12 and B12.

There are 8 different PRIME models with 25 SKUs in the PRIME model family looking at their site right now. And that's just one family of power supplies for one brand! There's another 11 Vertex SKUs, 33 FOCUS SKUs, 15 CORE SKUs. Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

[imiric]

> Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

Because products usually can't be compared spec-to-spec anyway. So even if you had to choose between Seasonic 800M and Corsair 800M, which might coincide on these specific criteria, how one company describes their product doesn't translate to how another company does. None of it would tell you which is the better product for you, which is ultimately what you want to know.

Consider CPU clock speeds, for example. The industry moved on from advertising MHz and GHz since they're not good indicators of performance. Consumers should also be aware of core count and types, cache size, power consumption, etc. Yet even if manufacturers embedded all of this information in their product names, CPUs from different manufacturers still wouldn't be comparable. So companies do their best to identify product lines internally, and give them somewhat consistent names.

I'm not saying that companies do a good job at this—most, in fact, make a mess out of it—, but I find that preferable to having obscure names like "Pro", "Plus", "Max", etc. with claims that it's simpler, when it's actually even more confusing than before.

[chrismcb]

Why is tx and px better than pro and pro Max? Typically pro Max is going to offer you more or better than what pro does. So pro Max tells me that it is probably better than pro (without designing what "better"is) but TX and PX which one is "better" and you can't always go by the price.

[dagw]

In this particular case TX and PX are referring to PSUs complying with certain third party certifications, and have a specific quantifiable meaning. So in this case Tx is always "better" (or at least not worse) than Px in a very specific sense.

[numpad0]

Often it's abstraction leakage. Prime and Core coukd be coming from different outsourced design teams. TX and GX could be different base design within same OEM. Or supplieed through same middlemen hence carrying same brands. Or each of groups meet certain internal criteria. Whatever.

Customers prefer segmentation by end result rather than by implementation details, and so corporate marketing divisions sometimes try that and group products by features it offers, but that often drive-by ruins product quality.

[yread]

Another variant of this is the washing machine nonsense:

Bosch WGG244ZANL

Which btw is a Series 6 machine (note the missing 6 in the type name)!

[cbsks]

That model number is actually super informative.

You have a washing machine, energy efficient, from 2021, model 24, 1200rpm spin speed, from the Netherlands.

https://splaitor.com/bosch-washing-machine-model-number-deco...

That doesn’t help compare it to other manufacturers, but it’s easy to compare to other Bosch washing machines.

[yread]

Strange, local shops show it as 1400rpm