They could have been NVidia (at best, more realistically 3dfx), but certainly not Apple.
Apple had to pick Be, Inc. or NeXT (who had Jobs). They went with the latter. Be, later on, went to Palm, but that was too little, too late.
SGI was one of the many Unix mastodons who fell victim of PC hardware (x86-32, then x86-64) and Windows NT, Linux being good enough, with Apple taking the piece for graphics designers and audio engineering (many whom came from Amiga, and SGI). Oh, and I forgot to mention: they bet on the Intel Itanic.
I wouldn't pay a dime for these nowadays. Way too slow / inefficient W/performance. Which is really sad, but with current energy prices I just wouldn't be able to afford my Octane 2 using 1 kW anymore. I owned many SGI machines, really loved them (the sound card in the Indy was insanely good! And IndyCam from a time when hardly anyone had a webcam). Indy (various, including Challenger S), Indigo (including purple remake), Indigo 2, and Octane 2. But never an O2 :) nor a Fuel or Tezro ;) cases, although plastic and sensitive to scratches, were great aesthetical, too. While I would not want such machine anymore, I will cherish the memories though! Plus, there are some people reusing the cases. Cool beans! IMNSHO, SGI machines like Indy belong in any half decent Unix museum.
I really wanted an SGI server rack because I thought it looked cool, and because I found them historically very interesting, but sadly those appear to have a bit of a collectors' market and are too expensive. Instead, I ended up buying a Sun Microsystems rack, which to be fair is also pretty cool historically.
I would love to buy a broken SGI machine and put some modern hardware in there, just for the aesthetic. Maybe someday.
The closest you can easily get is the 230/330/550 cases which are strait up ATX. I have a 550 case with a threadripper in it. The only issue was I had to modify the 750W PSU to fit in the case by replacing the IEC inlet with a short pigtail cord.
The mod to the PSU was needed because the IEC inlet was practically at the edge of the PSU housing which is partly obstructed by the edge of the SGI case. I could have modded the case by cutting the steel but I didn't want to cut up a unique case when the PSU is easier to replace. So I opened the supply, unscrewed the IEC inlet, de-soldered the leads from the inlet to the board then soldered in a length of 18 AWG cord. I covered the IEC inlet with a piece of 16 gauge (~1.2mm) aluminum with a 16mm hole for a cable gland and two screw holes for mounting with machine screws and nuts. The cord is secured by a metal cable gland and terminates to an in-line IEC socket. NOTE: I did replace the X and Y caps across the factory inlet with new ones I soldered to the PSU board with the cord.
The reason I ask, it's not like they were just making "components" like 3dfx or Nvidia at the time, they were making end-to-end workstations. Why is it such a stretch to think that they could have taken on Apple, especially since Apple in the 90s was kind of languishing?
Next basically tried, and only survived by being acquired.
If they had wanted to survive, they needed to buy Dell at the right time.