Have Simpler Product Lines Lead to Apple’s Success?

Think back to about ten years ago. How many people did you know that owned a Mac? Chances are, despite that they were still well-designed computers, probably not too many. Since then, though, things have changed dramatically. Apple now holds a good percentage of PC sales (mostly on the notebook side), so what exactly caused such a surge for a computer that doesn’t even run Windows? Well, according to news site Edible Apple, it all boils down to the company’s desire to keep their lines slim, and simple.

There are a few good points made here, my favorite being the fact that Apple doesn’t go all retarded with their naming schemes. If you had no idea what a MacBook Air was, you could probably take a guess that it was a lightweight machine, and then there’s the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Again, those are pretty easy to differentiate based on their names alone. Compare that to something like a Dell notebook. It’s difficult to tell right off what the difference between an Inspiron 1420 and Inspiron 1525 is. Plus, it just doesn’t read as well.

That’s of course not to say that the simplified approach is for everyone, and certainly, it’s probably of little interest to most readers of our website. But, it’s still a good point to consider. The majority of consumers are not tech-geeks, so how exactly are they supposed to differentiate various notebook models? Steve Jobs likes to keep things simple, and it sure looks like that practice played a significant role in Apple’s most recent success.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he himself found Apple’s product lineup to be convoluted and ultimately too confusing. He even quipped that if he couldn’t figure out the difference between a multitude of hardware models, how could Apple expect consumers to do so? Naturally, one of his first orders of business was putting the squeeze on Apple’s product lineup and focusing instead on only a few products that were to be marketed at either consumers or professionals.