> <i>Kuo said that "Apple's product segmentation strategy for standard models fails this year."</i><p>When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, Apple was selling a dozen different versions of the Power Macintosh alone. He got rid of most of the existing line-up and stuck with four devices—Power Mac G3 and PowerBook for the pro market, and the iMac and iBook for the home users.<p>Apple currently offers 5 different versions of the iPhone, 3 different watches, 4 iPads, 5 MacBooks, 4 Macs, plus more accessories and gadgets than I care to keep track of. Did they learn nothing from Jobs?
The most expensive version doesn’t have to sell much at all to be considered a success, because it may be that it convinced many to upgrade to the second most expensive.<p>For example, two products at five and ten dollars. They’re both good and people pick one or the other.<p>You add a third at fifty dollars that really isn’t much better than the ten, and suddenly the ten looks like a great bargain.<p>You don’t sell many fifties, but you sell way more tens that you did before.