A World Without Apple?

09.02.09

South Korea shows what the world might look like if the iPod and iPhone had never happened.

by Sascha Segan

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Imagine there's no Apple. Over here in the US, it's hard to do. But in technologically advanced, mobile-crazy South Korea, there's more iRiver than iPhone—no iPhones at all, no Apple stores, and far, far fewer iPods on the Seoul subway than I've seen 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 like Apple invented the touch screen, the media player, or the mobile Web browser. Most of Apple's innovations would have happened, they just might have happened differently.
Here are some ideas based on what I saw on the ground:
Triumph of the keyboard
Koreans, like Americans, love flip phones. That hasn't kept them off the Web. They surf on flip phones, text on flip phones, and watch TV on flip phones. Looking at the US, we love flip phones, phones with full keyboards, and iPhones. As I've said before, touch keyboards are fundamentally flawed; we only put up with typing on a touch keyboard 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—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 US 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.
Here's where I go out on a limb. The iPod monoculture in the US did great things for the digital music market, but it also locked us into DRM for years. As we found out through the disaster of Microsoft's PlaysForSure, DRM doesn't work well when there are too many different companies involved. Without the iPod, music firms may have taken longer to enter the digital market, but they may have done so with less DRM because no single solution could address enough of the market.
More TV?
Koreans are crazy about mobile TV. DMB, their mobile digital TV system, seems to be in everything. This, in large part, comes thanks to a proactive government that set aside spectrum and defined a mobile TV standard long before ours did. But free mobile TV also provides an interesting solution to the video DRM problem. Film and TV companies are even crazier about DRM than music companies are, resulting in a chaos of different formats. Having one standard for mobile TV let that form of video spread quickly, and perhaps there would have been more pressure for a common mobile TV standard here if Apple hadn't so dominated the media conversation.
Missing Links
Capacitive touch screens are marvelous, but I saw very few in Korea; most people seemed to be using styli on their touch-screen devices. (Before you comment, Korean isn't a character-based language like Chinese that requires you to draw characters with a stylus—it uses a 24-character alphabet.) The rage for capacitive touch screens in the U.S. has largely been driven by the success of the iPhone; manufacturers don't seem to get why users love them.
The big wild card, of course, is whether Apple's iProducts have pushed all interfaces forward. Many modern smart device interfaces—especially the touch screen ones—owe a lot to Apple's software design. What would interfaces look like if Apple hadn't brought big icons and simple menus to the game? Hopefully they wouldn't look like Windows Mobile 5—finger-unfriendly screens that borrow way too much from desktop PCs.
Apple and KT, a Korean wireless carrier, recently announced they were bringing the iPhone to Korea. So maybe the era of gadget diversity in Korea is coming to an end. But I don't think so; Koreans are very patriotic about their gadgets, and Samsung and LG are both innovative companies. I'm not sure if we can learn anything from Korea's relative avoidance of all things Apple, but it's still interesting to see a country where they really do think differently.
Follow me on Twitter! http://twitter.com/saschasegan

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I'm glad Apple is around. Thanks to Steve Jobs, his company focuses more on creativity and innovation ahead of profits and monopoly. More power to Apple and I hope more innovative products and design will come out from this company.

Raul B. Romilla