keeping the product line simple would put Apple out of business.
You're confusing "simple" (and carefully planned) with "small".
I think it’s more that Apple wouldn’t have grown to the size it is today without offering more products at different price points in order to cater to a wider demographic of users.
.....
Steve Jobs did what was best for the Apple of his era, just as Tim Cook is doing what is best for the Apple of today.
(NB: some rhetorical liberties with the timeline below, but...)
The first thing Jobs did was get Apple to drop all extraneous products like Newton and Quicktake, focus on Apple's core strengths in personal computers work to a tiny 2x2 'product grid'. That saved the company, and Apple is now the #4-or-so biggest maker of personal computers.
The second thing that Jobs did was to completely6 ignore his own advice and go off on a complete tangent with a portable music player. That succeeded beyond anybody's wildest dreams and ultimately led to Apple becoming one of the biggest and most famous brands in the world.
The third thing that Jobs did was sign off on the hockey-puck mouse and G4 cube...
Jobs was famous for making the original Mac sealed and non-expandable - but he also presided over the G4/G5/Original Mac Pro designs, which were among the easiest PCs
ever to open up and work inside.
Take home lesson: Steve Jobs was not a 2x2 grid on a Powerpoint slide in a MBA course.
As for "more products at different price points" - well, that's what Jobs did with the iMac, the original Mini and, in a way, the iPod - while there have
always been super-expensive "real pros only" options.
In the last few years Apple have jacked up the entry prices of pretty much
all the Macs (and this is in the tech market where
deflation is the expected norm) while being very slow at updating RAM and SSD specs/upgrade prices to match falling costs. There's no longer a sub-$1000 MacBook, or a sub-$500 Mac Mini or a sub-$3000 Mac Pro... and even the "entry level" $800 Mini and $6000 Pro have ridiculously poor specs for the price without adding expensive upgrades.
As for the iPhone - yes, there are a range of models and prices, but the actual range is a dumpster fire because several of the last 4-5 upgrade cycles have consisted of Apple adding new top-end models
only and just keeping on the last 2 years models as the mid/low end options. To be fair, they've rolled back a
bit from that with the iPhone 11 non-pro (but the XR and 8 are still on the list...).
As for the whole "wheels" debate raised by others:
Sure, if you don't need wheels don't get them, but the point is that, if you did pay such a premium price, the least you could expect would be a bit of attention to detail like 'hey we've made these super-smooth wheels, maybe we should put a lock on one of them?' or, even, 'hang on - if we put the power and USB-C on the
front or had opening
side panels like the old Mac Pros that everybody loved and you could open without unplugging all the cables from the back... then users could just leave the thing under their desk without continually needing to pull it out an wouldn't need wheels...'.
If Apple gets it into their head that they can get away with luxury pricing with 100% bling and 0% attention to detail then that will inevitably trickle down the whole product range.
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