The old chestnut of someone buying Apple has reared it’s ugly head again, now that IBM have sold their PC business.

Personally I think it’s a bit of a non-starter; IBM would stifle Apple’s freedom and I suspect that they’d haemorrhage creative staff after any such take-over. And I can’t really see Steve Jobs wearing a short sleeved shirt with a tie and a bunch of pencils clipped into his top pocket :)

On the other hand, some sort of strategic alliance would make a hell of a lot of sense. A bit of you-scratch-my-back technology sharing, a la the old Apple-Microsoft deal, would do no harm to either.