Bundles

A bundle is a collection of items that are offered or treated as a single unit. Bundling occurs in many contexts and can involve physical goods, digital products, services, or abstract structures. The term emphasizes a relationship among the items, often for efficiency, convenience, or to convey a combined value.

In commerce, bundles are common as marketing and pricing strategies. A bundle groups two or more products or services and sells them at a single price or with a shared promotion. Examples include meal deals, software suites, or hardware bundles. Bundles can improve perceived value, simplify purchasing decisions, and boost total sales, but they may reduce consumer choice or complicate inventory management.

In software and digital media, a bundle often refers to a packaged collection of programs or components. Bundling can streamline installation, licensing, and updates, and it may enable discounted pricing. In web development, bundling consolidates many code files into a smaller number of bundles to reduce network requests and improve load times. Bundlers such as Webpack or Rollup analyze dependencies to produce optimized outputs, though they can introduce build complexity and cache management considerations.

In mathematics, a fiber bundle is an abstract construction that formalizes the idea of a space that locally looks like a product but may have a different global structure. It comprises a base space, a total space, a fiber, and a projection map, together with a structure group describing how fibers are attached. Examples include the tangent bundle of a manifold and various line bundles. Fiber bundles provide a framework for studying geometry, topology, and symmetry.

Bundles also appear in logistics, media, and other fields as a general concept for organizing related items into a manageable whole.