Does Apple’s Mac line-up have a hole in it?
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of his early moves was to vastly simplify what had become a bloated line-up of Mac hardware. He famously showed off a two-by-two product grid: pro and consumer, desktop and portable. Filling the grid were four products – iMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook – each addressing one of those combinations.
The two-by-two grid lasted for several years, until the debut of the category-busting Mac mini in 2005. Since then, there’s been an almost magnetic impulse to cite the grid as the holy grail of Apple product design aspirations. Every time
