A key difference between Sinclair and Jobs was Sinclair's hostility to quality control and UX. Cheap at all costs! I would liken Sinclair to Jay Miner, perhaps: an engineering genius with a tendency to hit the reset button on business affairs over and over again.
Closer to Jobs in the UK scene was--and I know this is maybe a funny claim--Alan Sugar. The key similarity being the mid-1980s intuition that computers needed to be simple all-in-one consumer products. Jobs was tuned to the needs of the creative and professional classes, whereas Sugar was aiming for working class families, so the machines were very different.
But the reality is there aren't easy matches. The UK didn't produce people who were good at computers, good at business, and had access to enough capital to achieve escape velocity in the 1980s. Even when ARM bore fruit it was sold off, same as everything else there.
Closer to Jobs in the UK scene was--and I know this is maybe a funny claim--Alan Sugar. The key similarity being the mid-1980s intuition that computers needed to be simple all-in-one consumer products. Jobs was tuned to the needs of the creative and professional classes, whereas Sugar was aiming for working class families, so the machines were very different.
But the reality is there aren't easy matches. The UK didn't produce people who were good at computers, good at business, and had access to enough capital to achieve escape velocity in the 1980s. Even when ARM bore fruit it was sold off, same as everything else there.