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The Apple Tree: 35 years of Apple Products

7 points by polyfractal 15y ago

access_denied 15y ago
It's a bad infographic, because it distorts reality instead of making it more accessible. In the mid-years circa 1986-1996 Apple offered more products at a given time than they did prior to that or do today. The tree indicates otherwise.
blumentopf 15y ago
Hmm, the Quadra 800 shown in the 1997 branch was actually available since 1993...
podperson 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
kabdib 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.

7 points by polyfractal 15y ago

It's a bad infographic, because it distorts reality instead of making it more accessible. In the mid-years circa 1986-1996 Apple offered more products at a given time than they did prior to that or do today. The tree indicates otherwise.

blumentopf 15y ago

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

podperson 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

kabdib 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.