Steve Jobs couldn’t name his own laptop

So I’m sat in a product review meeting, first year as marketing director at a computer manufacturer, watching the team approve product number 12 for a range that already had 11 no one outside the building could tell apart.

No one in that room thought they’d done anything wrong. Every product had a champion and a customer story behind it. Add them all up and you get a range that makes perfect sense internally and absolutely nothing to the person paying.

Apple had this problem on steroids in 1998.

What did Apple do?

Apple cut the entire range down to a 2-by-2 grid:

• Consumer desktop
• Consumer portable
• Professional desktop
• Professional portable

One product would earn each box. FOUR products!

In a presentation that year, Steve Jobs said Apple had 15 product platforms, plus what he called “a zillion variants” of each. Even he couldn’t work out which Mac to recommend to friends; that’s a fairly savage diagnosis from the bloke running the company.

The Power Mac G3 and PowerBook G3 filled the professional boxes; the iMac became the consumer desktop, and the iBook later completed the grid.

This did plenty for Apple’s engineering focus. Jobs said a smaller range meant the A-team could work on every product and refresh them more often.

But I’m interested in what the grid did for the buyer.

It made the range legible.

You could look at those 4 boxes and find yourself: home or work, desk or bag.

Done.

What does the research say?

The useful lesson here is more precise than “sell fewer things.” Make the differences easier to understand.

You’ll often hear this explained as “choice overload”: give people too many options and they freeze. Nice theory. Slightly messier evidence (the kind that survives in decks long after the evidence stops).

A 2010 meta-analysis found the average effect of having more choice was close to zero. Sometimes a bigger range hurt. Sometimes it helped.

A later review found overload becomes more likely under 4 conditions: the options are hard to compare, the decision is difficult, the buyer isn’t sure what they want, or they want to spend as little mental effort as possible.

Computers can tick the bloody lot. Processor codes. Tiny specification differences. Unclear model names. A purchase you might live with for 5 years.

What’s my take?

Apple’s 4-box decision made each product feel more deliberate.

That matters because a confusing range can make every option look weaker. The buyer starts wondering whether there’s a better model they’ve missed, a feature they’re about to lose out on, a price difference designed to catch them out, or a support problem waiting after purchase.

A clear range sends a different signal: we know who this is for.

And confidence is persuasive.

I’d test any product range with 4 questions:

1. Can a buyer tell who each option’s for?
2. Can they explain the price difference in one sentence?
3. Does every option have a distinct job?
4. Would removing one make the decision easier without cutting something buyers still need?

That final question will make teams twitchy.

Products gather internal supporters. Somebody owns the revenue, and somebody remembers the customer who asked for it. No one fancies volunteering their SKU for the firing squad.

But a range built around internal comfort can become a maze for the person paying.

Apple made its computers easier to desire by giving every choice a reason to exist.

Which option in your own range survives only because everyone’s too scared to kill it?

Mark