If Steve Jobs walked into Apple Computer now, which products would he nix?


This edict came into play upon his 1997 return to Apple when there were too many products with no distinguishing features, so he nixed as many as he could. Since Jobs' passing, I see this issue coming back to Apple, as others do. In the diagram below, you can see the multitude of options* for each product. I'm not even including all the colors. If your friend walked into the Apple store and wanted an iPad, which of the 21 would they pick? Would they pick the iPad mini 2 or 4? Not sure what the difference is? Me neither.

If Steve Jobs walked into Apple Computer now, which products would he nix? What's the "one thing" Apple does well? I don't have a good answer. That scares the shit out of me.

I remember when I headed off to college in 1995, the Mac I picked out was a Performa 6214. I'm pretty sure it was the 6214, but I could be wrong because there was also the 6205, 6210, 6216, 6218, 6220, and 6230. Plus the base 6200 model and even more flavors for other markets. Many or all were available at the same time and the differences was basically what came bundled with it and market it was destined to be sold. Some were even just rebranded as a Mac LCs. Before the 6200 line was discontinued, Apple overlapped the 6300 series of machines for more boxes. Not to mention also the Quadra line of similar complexity and I think there may have been some Power Macs sprinkled in there.

Anyway, it was nuts. And that's just the desktop computers.

So, when Jobs came in with his quadrant doctrine it was a hard swerve towards sanity and also out of simple necessity. Apple was in deep trouble and couldn't maintain 31 flavors of everything. As Apple grew, so did its portfolio, but even still today with essentially unlimited resources, things are a long, long ways from the mid-90's.