Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out? (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the decades following World War 2, there was a dramatic expansion in choices for consumers. Where before there were only a few brands of bread, now there were dozens. Marketers were relentless in trying to fill every niche, to capture every last market segment. But in the 1990s and 2000s, we started to realize that this wasn't inherently a good thing. Choice paralysis demonstrably exists. It's made us start asking questions like: do we really need 30 types of jam on a store shelf? Is there a good reason for a firm to offer over 150 different pension plans? It turns out, no. Employees are much less likely to actually choose a plan when confronted with so many. In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who helped bring this idea to the fore, has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."

Comments

Re:The blindingly obvious

[CastrTroy]

I think that this is the main reason that Apple is doing so well. People understand exactly what they are getting when they choose an Apple product. You want a phone, You get to choose from 1 of 2 screen sizes, and 3-4 options for the amount of storage. That's a very easy decision to make. Same goes for their laptops. You get to choose ultra-thin or regular, then you get a few different options for screen size, and then you get 2 or 3 options that actually affect performance. Compare this to going to Dell, Lenovo, or HP. Whereas Apple might give you 10 options in total. The other guys will have 50 or more options to choose from.

Don't believe it's really that many, I just went to Dell's site. they have 3 lines for home use, without even getting into chrome books, they are Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware.

Inspiron has 3000, 5000, and 7000 series. Each of those has 4 different screen sizes. Each of those 4 screen sizes has on average 3 different performance/spec options. So, just from the Inspiron line, we have 3x4x3 options to choose from. That's 36 options. Alienware is a little more sane at only 16 options total, and XPS has 8 additional options.

That's a total of 60 options. And that's only looking at the "home" oriented laptops. I didn't dig down, but from the looks of it, there's even more choice in there. There is probably at least over 100 laptops to choose from when getting a Dell.