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Apple Right or Wrong? Part 5: Reducing the Range
December 21 1998
This article continues series on where Apple has gone right and where Apple has gone wrong. This time, I look at reducing the range. This is one area where Jobs was right on target. True, as I've complained before on this site, the high end was left a bit thin (slots, multiprocessor options particularly) ... though the rumoured new range for next year might fix that. And of course, Mac OS did not have great support for multiprocessor hardware. By the time G4 systems ship (the G3 doesn't have great support for multiprocessors either for that matter, but multiprocessor 350 MHz or better 604e systems could in principle have been developed), let's hope Mac OS X is ready and has good multiprocessor support. Even if there are some shortcomings in the range, look where it was before. Long before Jobs made his speech about not understanding all the models (when the iMac and new G3 PowerBook range were launched), I was trying to get this message through to Apple people. The range as it existed was crazy: shops like Sears were selling 603e systems at higher prices than low-end G3 systems, which were twice as fast. To hide this anomaly, Sears wasn't allowed to sell G3s. Compared to the PC world, things used to be very complex. As I've pointed out before, it's the PC world today that is shipping a confusing variety of different models which potentially creates positioning problems for suppliers: do they stick with Pentium MMX systems? Do they switch to the Celeron despite the fact that the original Celeron (often called Deceleron) had a bad name for having too little cache? Do they go with AMD? But attacking an over-complex range with a machete is relatively easy -- even if it took someone with Jobs's focus to do it. What of the future? The advertised strategy of "consumer" and "pro" models in principle is good, provided that Apple does not deliberately cripple the consumer models. The iMac has drifted a little in this direction (though overall I still feel it is a good overall deal: I even bought one myself). With a pruned range, this should not be necessary. With the previous huge range, there was a need to artificially differentiate so the large number of models could be justified. Today, it's not the case. The "consumer" models can in principle be as fast as the "pro" models: they just do not need quite as much expandability. So where next? I propose that Apple move aggressively on speed-bumping the iMac, and do something to really capture the imagination on the consumer notebook (some of the current rumours look good for this). And the pro models should take into account the criticisms of high-end users by allowing for more expansion, and multiprocessor designs. One problem Apple solved in recent times is inventory control (it seems likely that the web store may have helped a lot here by giving Apple more immediate feedback on what does or doesn't sell): something which must have been much harder with a more complex range. Even so, there have been cases of some models (like high-end PowerBooks) not being available in sufficient numbers. Another factor here must be the simplification of the range. But whatever Apple does, they should never get back to the stage where even a PhD in Computer Science is not enough to understand the range. Even if Apple's own marketing people are the cleverest people in the world and can bend their minds around such complexity, the average customer can't, and shouldn't have to. What's worse, the average sales person at Best Buy or (should they ever be re-appointed) Sears certainly can't be expected to be able to understand such a complex range of choices. 
Philip Machanick is at the Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. When he is not causing trouble and telling other people who charge a lot of money for their opinions that they're wrong, he teaches computer science and does research in computer memory systems. He also edits an African bookstore. He is president of SAICSIT, the national body for computer academics in South Africa. He is also president of the South African chapter of the IEEE Computer Society. For more, see http://www.cs.wits.ac.za/~philip/. 
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