I am publishing this a day earlier than I typically do, because it transpires that Apple is actually presenting tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
Apple is presenting today, which means that it's time to make one more post about their product stack before the show. As of this writing, nobody actually knows the exact purpose of the show. It might be about Macs, most of which would benefit from an update to Intel's Skylake processors, but it might also be about the iPad, especially as the 10-inch iPad appears to be prime for an update. One of the things I've noted before in Thinking About The 101 is that Apple's product line is… maybe not "full" but they ship a lot of different systems.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he massively shook up the model lineup (at that point, about seventeen "models" before customizations) by killing almost all of them at once when the Power Macintosh G3 and PowerBook G3 were introduced. Then, in 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. Just a year later, in 1999, the iBook was introduced, after a good twenty minutes talking about four product quadrants Apple had identified.
The short version is that they decided they needed a professional desktop, a professional laptop, a consumer desktop, and a consumer desktop. Every product event, Apple would trot out the quadrant and then use then-unreleased Keynote.app to poof or fade one of the boxes to its successor system.
It was a cute gimmick at the time and it worked well until once again, the Mac product family started to bloat. The Power Macintosh family had always been available in different speeds, but by 2005, there were two sizes of iBooks, three sizes of iMacs, the eMac, three sizes of Powerbooks, plus the new Mac mini, the Xserve, and Apple generally hadn't trotted out the quadrant chart since it no longer really looked like what they were doing.
Apple's product proliferation continues to this day. There are five iPads on sale, including two Minis and two Airs, there are three generations of iPhones on sale, in three physical form factor for five discrete models, and that is before you count different storage capacities or color options on the iPads and iPhones alike.
The scene today in the Mac product family is pretty similar. There are three families of desktops: Mini, iMac, and Pro. There are also three classes of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
The iMac is available in two sizes, and with two screens so you could make the case that it really counts as three products, and there is one MacBook, two MacBook Airs, and three MacBook Pro models. Apple sells no fewer than three different 13-inch laptops, plus a 11.6-inch and 12-inch system, and the lone dog up at the top, one 15-inch laptop.
By my count, that's eleven models, not counting the fact that Apple offers customization options on all of them. There's a case to be made for splitting the 15-inch MacBook Pro into two separate models as well -- one with discrete graphics and one without.
We're nowhere near 1997 levels of insanity, but I do wonder if Apple is (or should be) preparing for a culling. There's a lot of room to condense things, especially in the laptop area, especially since the "Pro" in MacBook Pro has almost always been completely meaningless. Apple's "professional" laptops aren't that much more expensive than premium Windows laptops that are their clearest competition, and for many things Mac users are doing on laptops, the "pro" distinction is even more meaningless than it was just five years ago. It's now possible, if not easy to do everything you might previously have done on a high-watt powerhouse of a laptop on a "lightweight" system such as the MacBook Air. (It helps that the current iteration of the MacBook Air was designed in an era when low-watt (17) Core2Duo chips were considered to be good only for web browsing and some Office tasks. In the Haswell generation and newer, what we've seen is that 15-watt CPUs are now the mainstream. As I've mentioned before, Intel's one and only 35-watt dual core CPU in the Skylake generation is reserved as an entry level part for high end PC laptops that have quad-core CPUs and discrete graphics. (In particular, it's seen in the Dell XPS 15 and the Inspiron 7559, but it may also show up in systems like the ThinkPad T460p.)
The biggest problem is that each of Apple's 13-inch laptops represents a slightly different mix. The 13-inch Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro (discussed previously) is essentially an old reliable product that still has a DVD drive, socketed RAM, and a SATA hard disk. The newer Retina version uses a 28-watt "U" series processor with IRIS graphics, and has soldered RAM and PCI Express solid state storage. The 13-inch MacBook Air has another non-retina display, 15-watt CPUs, and soldered RAM and solid state storage. The primary advantage of the Air is that it has utterly insane battery life, cited at 12 hours and often tested at about 17 or so hours, with light workloads.
The 11-inch MacBook Pro is more of the same, and the new Just-MacBook is arguably the most interesting laptop Apple sells, as it swaps almost everything people think about in Macs for a single USB Type C port, a Core M processor, and a small 12-inch Retina display, whose scaled resolution would be 1152x720, except that it's the first system Apple has chosen to default to a workspace that's not exactly half of the actual number of pixels.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is the only system Apple sells in that size, and it's both insanely expensive and insanely powerful. Apple has elected not to use any dual-core parts in this system, but $1,999 for the model with a 2.2GHz CPU, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of an IRIS Pro graphics chip feels excessive, in comparison to $1,549 for a Dell XPS 15 with a newer 2.2GHz CPU, 8GB of faster RAM, a 2GB GTX960M, a 4K display, and a 1TB spinning hard disk. At the top end of Dell's XPS 15 product stack is a version with the i7-6700HQ, 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, 4k display, and that 2GB GTX960M graphics card for $2129.
I realize that Apple's not optimizing for cost, but it feels like they are missing the mark, especially given that all of this hardware is now using Haswell CPUs. I can't help but wonder exactly how important things like 16 gigs of RAM actually are in a base model, when Dell can offer a system with a similar display for almost $500 less. Of course, the actual starting price for the XPS 9550 is $999, but that configuration has an i3-6100H dual core CPU, 8 gigs of RAM, a spinning hard disk, and a 1080P display.
However, if we want Apple to condense, Dell is hardly the best example, as they are probably selling somewhere between 30 and 40 discrete computer models, before you count customization within a series. They just happen to be a good yardstick for what the desktop computing industry is doing in general.
One suggestion has been that in the process of moving forward to Skylake and also as they change the chassis to match what the MacBook looks like, Apple may re-frame the whole MacBook family. This is all idle speculation, but it does make sense. The idea here is that Apple will build one or two larger MacBook sizes, and three MacBook Pro sizes. Perhaps the sizes will be 12, 14, and 16 inches, and ultimately, the MacBook and MacBook Pro will be like the iPad, where the Pro is "the same, but nicer."
This is if Apple doesn't choose to find or create some other meaningful way to differentiate these products, such as by building the Pro with serviceable components, or putting quad-core CPUS or IRIS 540 graphics in the MacBook Pro, while using dual-core CPUs and Intel HD 530 graphics in the MacBook.
Another possibility is to use whatever CPU fits most naturally in any given chassis, but add discrete graphics to the Pro family. I think there's even a fair chance they would consider something like this, because the MacBook is already successfully driving a Retina display (at a non-integer scaling factor) from sub-IRIS graphics.
It may be possible that Apple may prefer to "balance" the product line rather than simply cull things out. Introducing a 15-inch MacBook Air or re-positioning "The 101" as a 15-inch laptop will take the focus away from 13-inch laptops -- even though if I had to guess why it's like that, it's because 13-inches is the most popular laptop size right now.
The most obvious move would be to discontinue the 101, but I don't know if Apple will do that. In fact, it would be hilarious and I would not at all be surprised to find out that Apple releases a completely redesigned Mac laptop family, but leaves the 101 in, further proving that it's there for some kind of reason, and that Apple utterly does not care about it.
On the iPad and iPhone side of things, I think the best Apple can do is reduce how far back they sell things. I think it says a lot about the platform in general that they can sell years-old iPad and iPhone models new, and that's really great, but it has caused problems for them before, in needing to support iOS on hardware it has been shipping very recently.