Sun almost bought Apple in 1996

> But former Apple CEO John Sculley's most catastrophic mistake was committing the company's computers to the PowerPC processor, while Microsoft, IBM, and Intel teamed up to make Windows run on the cheaper, more popular x86 chips.

This is wrong in many ways. PowerPC had better performance at that time, and Intel didn't catch up until around 2000.

IBM didn't help Microsoft to develop Windows. Instead, while Microsoft was working on MS-DOS and Windows, IBM partnered with Microsoft to develop OS/2 and Presentation Manager. This partnership ended in 1990 and IBM kept on with OS/2 for a while.

Also, IBM had no interest in making the x86 popular. In fact, they originated the PowerPC and teamed up with Apple and Motorola to make it. This alliance tried but failed to get the OS/2 and Windows markets to switch to PowerPC.

EDIT: Actually, Sculley himself felt that the switch to PowerPC instead of x86 was a mistake. But he said this in 2003, ten years after he was fired from Apple. It didn't seem like such a bad idea the time. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/john-sculley-admits-intel...

If this had happened, would IOS apps be written in Java ala android? Would ios even exist?