

The Apple Tree: 35 years of Apple Products - polyfractal
http://mashable.com/2011/07/18/apple-design-infographic/

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kabdib
I was at Apple in the early 90s, and my parents called me one day to ask what
newer model Mac I recommended they replace their old Mac with.

I couldn't tell them.

I /worked/ for the stupid company, and I couldn't figure out what they needed.
Quadras, Performas, any number of pizza box things. I asked my cow-orkers, and
none of them had any idea, either.

To this day I look at a product line with more than about three choices as
consumer fail.

~~~
burgerbrain
Yet somehow every few years my grandparents pick themselves out a new dell
with no trouble, and are rather pleased with it.

More than three choices in cars don't seem to baffle people. You just need to
be able to apply the same sort of consumer calculus to computers and you'll do
just fine.

~~~
kabdib
Dell's done okay with a product line model I'd categorize as "Organized
Confusion." I just looked at their site; in the years since I last bothered
with them, they've added a fourth root category (Home, Small Biz, Large
Enterprise /and/ Public Sector). Dive into any one of those and you'll see a
nicely ordered and small set of machines, cheap and wimpy to fast and
expensive.

But across Dell's lines, if you picked a machine from the Small Biz bucket and
compared it to a machine in the Enterprise bucket, could you tell which was
better?

Apple in the 90s was horribly confusing; no buckets. They just sort of barfed
out a bunch of machines with not a lot of thought about customers. What would
a business buy? A performa? A Quadra? What about that PowerPC thing?

So Dell's been careful to keep choices relatively few. (Once you choose a
"chassis you can customize the heck out of it, but you're pretty much limited
to components they stuff into sockets when they build the machine, and some
colored plastic).

There are markets where more than a couple of choices will /kill/ you. Game
consoles and other platforms (phones), for instance. Making developers worry
about a zillion platforms will murder an app market and expose you to
competition to folks who might have crappier hardware, but a more consistent
story.

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podperson
A general problem is that recent products with minor differences are
emphasized. A more reasonable diagram would show a confusing proliferation of
products during the early 90s followed by rationalization.

Where's the QuickTake Camera? The Apple II floppy drive (which built the
empire)? The ImageWriter and LaserWriter (which built the Mac empire?)? Oh and
the sidecar based desktop design (the single longest-lived Mac case, and one
of the best? Or its predecessor the Iicx? Oh, and the SE?

Took me ages to figure out the 2000 product was the Cube.

~~~
masklinn
And it's not really a tree, it's a crappy timeline. An "evolutionary tree" of
Apple, with relations between the products (something similar to the wikipedia
release timelines[0] but more fleshed out and with better relational links à
la Unix History graph[1]) would have been nice.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg>

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blumentopf
Hmm, the Quadra 800 shown in the 1997 branch was actually available since
1993...

