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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere <35 models of iPhone in the fifteen years of its existence. Part of the problem was, companies like Nokia couldn't conceive thinking that there could be one model that's good for everyone. Like music? You need to get a music phone like XpressMusic. Business person? Get N97. Low on budget? Get the simple 1108. The proliferation of models just spread expertise, and marketing dollars, and ended up diluting both. Instead of making one awesome phone, you have tons of mediocre models.

The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale.

[1]: https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050

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> The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone

No, it doesn't work for everyone.

He showed that there are enough people who can and are willing to pay for a premium device. He choose a niche.

Nokia uses a classic price segmentation strategy.

Yeah, nah. In their lineup much of the models were exactly equivalent, only with a different shell, at best camera or display.

Exactly - market segmentation was huge and every phone was basically "identical" - storage space, processor speed, connection speed, even screen size, these things really didn't "matter" much yet.

Gotta find myself a niche like that.

The genius of Steve Jobs was simply that he had enough taste, vision and authority that the company was actually focused on delivering _products_.

The state of the average enterprise, like Microsoft and Google, is that various business units and departments have devolved into cargo culting process to satisfy the petty career needs of their managers and workers.

It's not complicated. The people in charge not only do not understand product development, but they fundamentally don't care and will get uncomfortable if you try to make them care. It is far too tall an order, and too much work.

The genius of Steve Jobs/Apple was recognizing that phones should become computers. And that people would be willing to sacrifice battery life for that to happen.

It’s really that simple. People keep forgetting but the iPhone wasn’t the first Apple designed phone. The Motorola Rokr was. And it was a failure because it was an Apple designed Phone.

The iPhone, OTOH, was a computer in your pocket, of which one function was a phone. When the iPhone came out the RIM guys thought it was gonna be a massive failure because it had such terrible battery life and such a terrible typing experience.

But it turned out people didn’t care as much about battery life (also, Apple had gained a lot of experience with optimizing battery life through years of tuning OSX to be able to build the most energy efficient laptops) as they did about the massive screen.

Typing was a poorer experience, but auto-correct was good enough.

The phone guys who spent all their time trying to make longer lasting phones with a better physical keyboard simply could not conceive that those factors might not even be all that important for consumers.

Finally, what really blew up the iPhone was the App Store, and it’s hard to see anyone else doing it, because very few companies had the experience building up a high quality developer platform the way Apple had. Very few other companies had the developer following which would build apps for them despite the massive constraints Apple was imposing on them.

I don't think Apple really designed the Rokr. It was a Motorola E398 with a terrible version of "iTunes" and a horrible 100 song limit as to not cut into the sales of the iPod.

Phones as computers was already out there as an idea and Handspring and others had been trying to make it work.

The iPhone was more limited as a computer than a competing Palm OS or Windows Mobile device but it was more slick and in some ways polished (although lacking in others). And of course they still had the bulk of then DRM locked digital music/video sales they could leverage to make it appeal to consumers.

So I am not the only one who thinks their deluge of models was ridiculous. To be fair, most of them - for better or for worse - had the same guts (they only used a handful of bseband chips most probably from TI internally named UPP8M, UPPWD2, UPP2M); from service manuals you can tell the most often varied thing was the RF section. But still, NRE, tooling and certification would cost millions per model. Injection molds would cost serveral hundred grand alone.

It's like when you go to the cheap lunch restaurant that have 70 items on their menu vs the fine dining place that has a set three course menu for the evening. Quantity signals cheapness.

Samsung squits out like 50+ phone models a year. That's like one every week.

How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?

You're right, if they had any business sense they'd be making more than a piddling $1B/month - https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings...

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