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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.

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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

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