Your own product line may be the key to Apple's current success

Matt Burns, author of CrunchGear, published this week an article with which I identified a lot. According to him, the key to Apple's current success is its own * lean * product line. You may not have stopped to think about it calmly, but on the hardware side, Apple today basically has a smartphone, four iPods, three notebooks and three desktops. That’s it.

Apple's entire Mac product line

By comparison, companies like Garmin offer consumers 82 (!) GPS units to choose from. My God, I'm already crazy when I have three models of a certain product to compare, I see specification by specification to make sure what is best for me … but 82 ?! to drive anyone crazy. We all know that if Apple decided to produce a GPS, it would offer one, if very two models and that's it.

Want more examples? Canon today sells 23 cameras point-n-shoot within four product lines; Nikon, 17 out of three; Monster Cable offers HDMI cables in 10 different product lines; Motorola currently shows 27 cell phones available on its website. With a single device, Apple sold 88% more than this one, in 2008. In addition to driving any potential buyer crazy, it all contributes to high investments in the production of all this variety of models.

As a longtime Apple consumer, thinking this way shows me how beneficial such positioning and organization are for Apple. If you visit the site of a Sony for life, you will surely be lost in less than 3 minutes. Even the Apple site map is very simple, so lean and well separated that things are. What do you think about that?