There Is Too Much Stuff
This paragraph mirrors something I&#x27;d been thinking for a while:<p>&gt;For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race.<p>I really value it when companies offer some simple differentiated product lines, and are confident enough in the products to recommend one. If you go to Apple.com wanting a computer and click &quot;Mac&quot; at the top, then the site breaks it down into only a couple categories. The page has big pictures of one of their flagship desktop options and of one of their flagship laptop options. You&#x27;re probably not going wrong in picking one of them. Apple stands by them and updates them and those machines have their current recommended experience and software setup, though really that also goes for any of the other machines. The other laptop categories are mostly about how thin you want your laptop; the categories aren&#x27;t perfect but it&#x27;s not hard to imagine how to pick between them.<p>Now go search for &quot;dell laptops&quot; or &quot;lenovo laptops&quot;. You get pages leading to giant grids of laptops with no obvious categorization or ordering. -- Do I consider myself as looking for a &quot;professional&quot; laptop or a &quot;home office&quot; laptop? Do the &quot;gaming&quot; laptops have the best hardware, or do they just have the same hardware as the &quot;professional&quot; laptops with flimsier gamer-themed cases? Which models do they put the Superfish crap&#x2F;malware on again? -- The part that really feels the strangest to me is that there&#x27;s no flagship model. My eyes are glazing over looking at these grids. If I were in a store, this is the part where I&#x27;d tell the salesman that I&#x27;d love it if they could recommend me their standard new general model, and I&#x27;d hope they&#x27;d hand me a machine they were confident in. I feel like the Dell site isn&#x27;t confident enough in any of the models to push it onto shoppers. It makes me want to run away back to Apple&#x27;s site.<p>Maybe my thinking is really influenced by my phone experience. Years ago, I used to have a certain popular but cheaper phone carrier. When I went to their site, they had a big grid of phones to choose from. I picked one of the ones near the top that wasn&#x27;t the cheapest, that I think I remembered from some ad, and assumed it was one of their flagship choices. It was slow, didn&#x27;t support certain features like tethering, was on an old Android version, and never got updates. I spent a long time wondering whether this was really the average customer experience of theirs, or did I just accidentally pick an old model that they hadn&#x27;t gotten around to de-listing?<p>Eventually I decided to switch phone services, and most phone carriers looked pretty much the same. A billion phone options, and also lots of plan options. Even if I&#x27;d heard good things about the company and they presumably had a good average customer experience, I was worried that I&#x27;d pick a wrong choice and have a worse experience. Then I found Google Project Fi, which just had one plan option, and heavily recommended the Pixel phone. I went with them and haven&#x27;t regretted it. The Pixel has good hardware, but it also has regular Android on it, regular updates, and a lack of crapware. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s other providers that offer good choices like that, but it feels like it would take some research and risk to figure out the non-risky &quot;right choice&quot; at a different provider.