Dieter Rams was for a long time the most relevant designer of the Braun brand and a personality within industrial design, followed by many with a distinct style of their own, has always been a cult character for Jonathan Ive, the VP of industrial design at Apple, who has been inspired by many of the Rams designs, which is a compliment to the Braun designer himself.
In a very recent interview with Fast Company publication, this prolific designer said that if he had to start over "he would not want to be a designer." However, if you were forced to do it again and have to take out your sketchbook and design a computer, surely looked a lot like the products that Apple has for sale.
In many magazines or on the Internet, people compare Apple products to things that I have designed, with some transistor radios from 1955 or 1965. In terms of aesthetics, I think their designs are brilliant. I do not consider it to be a copy of my designs. I take it as a compliment.
Dieter Rams got his start in design by studying architecture at the Wiesbaden School of Art in 1947. Once he graduated and landed a business job, a colleague recommended that he take a look at Braun's advertisement for an architect. . He did indeed get into Braun and this got him more involved with industrial design of the company. His architect training was incredibly helpful when it came to product design.
In industrial design, production has to be planned in advance […] You have to think carefully beforehand what you are doing and how you are going to do it, because for architecture and industrial design, the cost of changing things later is much higher than it takes to better prepare the project in advance.
Looking at the designs and philosophy of this designer, perhaps Dieter Rams surely would have been the chief designer at Apple if the brand had been present in the years in which he worked for Braun.