The thing is that these companies have so many SKUs because they're trying to address so many market segments and so newer is not always automatically better. Then technology (and competition) advances at an uneven pace so you end up with some generations (2 -> 3, 6 -> 7, 10 -> 11) where the generational difference is "who cares", and some generations (9 -> 10, 11 -> 12) where basically the entire old generation is obsolete.
Apple is tackling an easier problem since they're focusing on subdivisions of the high margin premium consumer segment. But there's a world of difference between the €1400 base model m1 macbook air and the €550 windows machines the standard consumer here buys. A lot of Apple's target market looks at the €1400 MBA doing quite well against comparably priced windows machines (well as long as you aren't gaming, running legacy business applications, or actually in need of more than 8gb of RAM), and sees the €950 price difference to what people actually buy as irrelevant, but for e.g. my parents that pays for their next laptop in a decade too.
Once you're into that price sensitive market, you end up needing from a business imperative that smattering of SKUs, since the person selling a €600 laptop wants something they can point to as better than the €550 laptop and at that market, people are not buying €50 for lighter or more aesthetically appealing laptops. Then a sort of mirror happens at the high end since it's users buying CPUs directly and therefore more informed so it's not as easy to just make some tiers and extract maximum consumer surplus for the higher tiers.
Apple is tackling an easier problem since they're focusing on subdivisions of the high margin premium consumer segment. But there's a world of difference between the €1400 base model m1 macbook air and the €550 windows machines the standard consumer here buys. A lot of Apple's target market looks at the €1400 MBA doing quite well against comparably priced windows machines (well as long as you aren't gaming, running legacy business applications, or actually in need of more than 8gb of RAM), and sees the €950 price difference to what people actually buy as irrelevant, but for e.g. my parents that pays for their next laptop in a decade too.
Once you're into that price sensitive market, you end up needing from a business imperative that smattering of SKUs, since the person selling a €600 laptop wants something they can point to as better than the €550 laptop and at that market, people are not buying €50 for lighter or more aesthetically appealing laptops. Then a sort of mirror happens at the high end since it's users buying CPUs directly and therefore more informed so it's not as easy to just make some tiers and extract maximum consumer surplus for the higher tiers.