You know the kind of thing: “What if Wolverine was a cross-dresser?”, “What if Batman was in the Beatles? (Would they then be ‘the Battles’?)”, “What Doctor Doom had three legs and a pet octopus named Dave?”
Well, I thought on the train this morning, let’s apply that kind of alternative dimension thinking to Apple. What would happen if Steve Jobs were a Brit? And, equally intriguing – what if Jonathan Ive were a yank? Here are my conclusions…
The iconic Apple design would be a little…different
If you look at US product design – say Ford sportscars, the Xbox 360 or (hoho) the Zune – it’s very clear that the aesthetic, to put it politely, doesn’t quite have the same minimalist chic appeal as the current Apple product line. It’s all about bulk and muscle. So let us imagine a Jonathan Ive born in 
Eyecatching, certainly. Elegant? As an elephant doing the fandango on crystal meth...
And those keynotes wouldn’t be quite the same
You can say what you like about us Brits, but you could never accuse us of being overly cocky. We don’t really do the whole ‘I’m great and my product is fuckin’ fantastic!’ thing. In fact, we’d rather die than ‘big ourselves up’. Think Hugh Grant in ‘Micky Blue Eyes’ (or any of his other films). It isn’t a cliché – it’s ALL True. So Sir Steven Jobs the Englishman wouldn’t do the ‘just one more thing’ part of his keynote in the same way. You’d be expecting an anti-climax and then, by god, you’d get one. Rather than “"Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is...", Sir Steven would tell us: “Er…we’ve got this product and it’s quite good I suppose. It’s…erm..a phone and it does other things too. And here it – er – is…”
The conclusion
Business disaster. Utter ruin. We’d live in a world where the Zune is the MP3 player to be seen with and Dell PCs are cutting edge design. A grim vision I know – thank god it’s only in my imagination…
