SASCHA SEGAN
A World Without Apple?
I
magine there’s no Apple. Over here in the U.S., that is a very hard thing to do. But in technologically advanced, mobile-crazy South Korea, there’s more iRiver than iPhone. In fact, there are no iPhones at all, no Apple stores, and far, far fewer iPods on the Seoul subway than I’ve seen riding the subway in New York. That made me think: What if Steve Jobs had never returned to Apple, and the company had crumbled as was widely expected in the 1990s, or just stayed a second-tier PC maker? Would the world’s tech market look a little more like Korea’s? Obviously, Apple’s design innovations have had an effect on everyone in computing and media—even on the gadgets I saw in Korea. But it’s not as if Apple invented the touch screen, the media player, or the mobile Web browser. Most of Apple’s innovations would have happened anyway; they just might have happened differently. Here are some ideas based on what I saw in South Korea. 44 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION NOVEMBER 2009
Triumph of the Keyboard Koreans, like Americans, love flip phones. But that hasn’t kept them off the Web. They surf on flip phones, text on flip phones, and watch TV on flip phones. Here in the U.S., we love flip phones, phones with full keyboards, and iPhones. As I’ve said before, touch keyboards are fundamentally flawed; we put up with typing on a touch keyboard only because we love the rest of the iPhone’s features. An Apple-less world would have a lot more physical keyboards in it. More Diversity, Less DRM Yes, Korea has its faults. For example, one of the ways the country has kept Apple out is through laws that favor domestic manufacturers. But ironically, that protectionism seems to have created more diversity than the iPod monoculture you see in big U.S. cities. I saw people tapping on big-screen Windows CE media players, typing on things that looked like tiny laptops with tinier keyboards, and listening to music on both traditional flip phones and iRiver MP3 players.
