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Comment by bmj | Hacker News Reader

Apple offers a rather limited range of laptops. Other manufacturers are attempting to offer a greater range of options for all consumers (and consider for companies like HP and Dell, their largest customers are corporations). The codes allow for easier differentiation in a given product line.

That said, Dell seems to have the sanest conventions, with HP/Compaq offer nothing more than product codes.

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I think Apple does that on purpose, they never seem to have more than about 3 choices for their devices (the paradox of choice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice)

2 sizes of iPod Nanos (you also pick the color)

3 sizes of iPod touches

3 sizes of iPhones (+ pick color)

3 15inch MacBook pros (+ 2 13inch and 1x 17inch)

It seems once you have made some basic choices like screen size or color you are down to 3 choices fairly spaced in price which equate to small, medium or large.

And having too many options is what is killing these companies compared to Apple. Quite frankly people don't care that you have XYZ mobo processor or graphics card inside. They just want the dam thing to work.

"Tyranny of Choice" at its best.

Wasn't that the lesson Apple learned the hard way? IIRC one of the first thing Jobs did on his return to Apple was to trim the product line.

Yep. Pre-Jobs, the Apple offerings were as muddled as the PC examples given above, especially with the introduction of the PPC boxes, which were all assigned names like 7200/75 or 7215/90. Steve did away with all of these and offered only four core products (iBook, PowerBook, G-series and iMac) until the intro of the Cube, which nobody remembers, and the iPod, which nobody can forget. :)

It was even worse than that because they had the Performa (low end) and Quadra (high end) lines and certain models were identical. Also at different times they had the "LC"(Low Cost) series and just plain "Power Macintosh" series.

Read this and try to keep it straight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5300

I think the major companies have become too attached to their habits to do much about it; the suggestions in this thread seem more directed towards the smaller fish who are still able to overhaul their business completely.

As much as I would love companies like Lenovo to get their act together.

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