> IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models -

I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.

> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.

I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.

> I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.

Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.

Creating SKUs to avoid price matching is still just having one product coming out of the factory. It's just extra space in a database somewhere, so it costs nothing. The PC makers do have to create new physical products for each of those SKUs though. So it's apples and oranges here

Washing machines and the others don't have a company like Apple that is so differentiated that customers love their products so much they get to own something like 80% of the profits of the biggest personal computing market.

The epitome of "sku engineering" is mattresses, to keep consumers from comparison shopping. Retail HATES competition and informed shoppers.