Lot of people wave their hands and complain about Apple’s lineup in the late 90s, but Riccardo Mori has done the hard work of listing all of the various Macintosh models that were for sale in 1996:
In a nutshell: there was some level of organisation in what many have called the chaos of Macs available back then, and despite the long list of Mac models, the families and form factors were just a few; one of the main causes that generated confusion in the Macintosh product line was the frequent rebranding, and the progressive meaninglessness of the Performa line as the consumer choice versus the Power Macintosh as synonymous of ‘Pro’ machine.