Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmmBacon | Hacker News Reader

One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus. Options mean inventory, development and test costs etc... and can be sources of quality problems triggering warranty repairs or replacements. Doing few things allows one to streamline both product development and manufacturing.

View on HN

Apple's product line is "simple" for marketing reasons. It's easier for customers to understand what product is right for them, then funnel them into configuration option trees. While limiting SKUs is still good retail practice (especially if you primarily sell through indirect channels), the ability for customers to easily understand your product portfolio is what's really important.

I do agree that they have slipped in this area, though I think it's an inevitable consequence of being a trillion dollar company. Apple was only able to become a trillion dollar company because their marketing and operations were easier to manage, and companies in a market-leading position typically grow until the point their size overwhelms their ability to steer the ship.

Except they still offered options, but without modularity, so you had more SKUs to track in your logistics - you still need to track the parts you solder down, except now instead of shipping a base system and being able to make a "CTO" version, or just let authorised resellers with authorised service points apply the right parts, you need to wait till a whole extra SKU gets moved through thousands of kilometers of logistic chain for your one tiny order.

Maybe the experience in USA with Apple Stores is different, but when forced to buy a Mac by work recently I had to deal with some ridiculous wait times just for asking for 32G ram.

It's so much better in the USA that I wait until I visit home to do anything Apple related, whether it's to order a new custom laptop or to send my laptop in for service.

For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.

Definitely a different experience everywhere else I've been when dealing with Apple whether it's Mexico City or Lisbon. Most places are even lucky to have an actual Apple Store rather than some sort of certified 3rd party with questionable liability.

>> For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.

You mean a new unit? I highly doubt the repair happened in 24 hours.

When I ordered a max spec MBP there was a 2 week lead time before it was shipped overnight directly from Shenzhen to our office in California.

My interpretation was that Apple does not build and hold inventory of every SKU, certain configurations are built at the time of purchase and it took 2 weeks for the factory to process our order.

Minimizing SKUs was the Jobs way. I’d say Apple has since then taken very different approach. Just check the number of iPad and iPhone variants.

They have more variants then in the past, but when compared to competitors today they still offer a more simplified lineup.

During the Jobs era Apple had:

4 different types of iPods - Shuffle, Nano, Classic, Touch

3 iPhones: gen, gen-1, gen-2

3 laptops: Air, MacBook, Macbook Pro,

4 desktops: Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, XServe.

It was only the "Jobs way" when they were about to go bankrupt.

How many more would there have been without him?

Anyway, You listed 14 unique devices. In the late 90s Apple probably had that many Performas alone, never mind everything else.

I was responding to a post that said Apple didn’t have as many SKUs during the Jobd era.

Now Apple has

iPod - 1

Watch - 4

Laptops - 3

Desktops - 3

Phones - 6

iPads - 4 (I left off the iPad before)

20 SKUs. Before they had 15.

But, the iPhone was crippled during the Jobs era because iOS had no frameworks to have multiple screen sizes.

> One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus.

One way. The other is, if your computer breaks you either upgrade or spend a lot to have it repaired by Apple. There's no downside in using non soldered down ram and storage, it's just the nth lock in strategy.

Storage is one thing and I agree it should be M.2 (though there are other complicating issues like compatibility with 3rd party SSDs), but RAM requirements for desktop / laptop PCs have largely held steady for the last decade (at 16 to 32GB). Sure there are specialized uses for more than that, but you're almost always better off executing those workloads in the cloud than on your laptop.

You mean like video editing / special effects? I really qeustion this is something that should be moved to cloud, as it's really easy to have several Terrabytes of source material one has to handle.

The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage. The permutations of that are much more numerous than adding a touch bar vs physical keys option.

>> The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage.

Okay, but then they’d lose money by not selling their proprietary parts.

Removing the touchbar has a material financial impact to Apple? We're talking about a CNC machine here, that's how they carve out the aluminum chassis. It would literally involve them carving out less aluminum from the block, because the touchbar would no longer be needed.

Quality problems? You mean like the over-engineered keyboard they've had issues with for three years?

Some decades longer design patterns are battle tested/aren't broken, yet Apple continually tries to break them - thinness to the extent that they now solder memory/disk to the board, putting out a keyboard design that isn't sufficiently tested, and all sorts of Catalina issues that people have documented online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com