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Comment by antipaul | Hacker News Reader

Focused on "simplicity", they used to have only a "tableful" of products.

With more products, will Apple collapse under the weight of the complexity?

They pretty much still only have a "Good -> Better -> Best" ladder for the majority of their products, with a handful of "niche" offerings sprinkled in. Complexity hasn't increased much from those days, they added one extra column and row

iPhone: iPhone 17e -> iPhone 17 -> iPhone 17 Pro (Niche: iPhone Air)

iPad: iPad -> iPad Air - > iPad Pro (Niche: iPad Mini)

Mac Laptop: Macbook Neo -> Macbook Air -> Macbook Pro

Mac Desktop: Mac Mini -> iMac -> Mac Studio

They have product with different screen sizes, but those are really just configuration options on the base product in that tier, now. Compare that to offerings from Samsung or Dell and you can see it could be much, much more complicated.

That was a different era of consumer behavior. Consumers are hyper targeted with personalized organic and paid messages. The algorithmic media ecosystem mitigates or counters complex product offerings. For example, my YouTube feed displays Apple Pro devices reviews over other lines like iPad basic. Also, purchase power acts as a natural filter.

The customer base is also so much bigger. Just before the the iMac was introduced, they were selling under half a million Macs per quarter. And that was divided up among a bunch of different models. That makes it much harder to manage production and inventory, and your development costs get spread across fewer units. With 10x more Mac sales and 100x more iPhone sales, there’s more room for variety.

There is a difference between 5 B revenue and 400 B revenue.

Also the price point shifted from primarily a 2K machine, to all price ranges, with the original iPhone being a few hundred bucks. More sales smaller units so the number of products being sold is more than it appears based on the revenue comparison.

Maybe the price per unit is available somewhere for people to trend how it changed over 2-3 decades.

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