Creating a list of objects in Python

You demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding.

You never created an instance of SimpleClass at all, because you didn’t call it.

for count in xrange(4):
    x = SimpleClass()
    x.attr = count
    simplelist.append(x)

Or, if you let the class take parameters, instead, you can use a list comprehension.

simplelist = [SimpleClass(count) for count in xrange(4)]