Well it's made easier by the fact that they only have one of each category. Want a desktop all-in-one? You'll want the iMac. This one is "the best iMac ever." They only compare them against themselves, so you can know that the 2015 is better than the 2014 and worse than the 2016.
What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.
> What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.
They do seem to be coming out of it finally, but for a good while almost every Mac's entry level config was awful, the spinning hard drives being the worst offender considering a computer without an SSD just feels broken these days.
I was about to say that the 21.5" iMac isn't so bad now they've dropped the platters, until I checked and saw that they're still selling the model with a 1080p panel!
To me, Tim Cook's lasting influence on the Mac is the transition from a "good, better, best" set of configuration options to "poor, good, better". Continuing to sell old and crappy models to hit a price point—like the 2010 MacBook Air that continued to be sold with only minor spec bumps until 2018, and the aforementioned entry-level iMac which has been around since 2012—reflects very poorly on them.
Well they don't really have only one of each category. They just market it like that and instead of giving variations a different product name, they treat it like the same product but with different attributes. For the laptops for example, they have different size models with different performance specs and hardware that changes over time. But they sell all of those options as a Macbook Pro. You might have a 2018 Macbook Pro 13", but by calling it just the Macbook Pro, they keep the number of models that users need to know about manageable.
I don't think it's just that they have fewer items in a category (they do) but that if you took all their SKUs for all products into markets, sub-markets, demographics, and ultimately individuals making purchases/using a particular SKU and organized it into a hierarchy - it would be almost a perfect tree with very few leafs touching the same branch.
Compare to Dell, whose equivalent datastructure would be a directed graph that probably contains cycles and non-sensical topology.
What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.