> The monopoly issues would have prevented acquisition.
Or forced selling off Apple's OS business, which would have been more dangerous to Microsoft if it wasn't tied to a firm that was dedicated to using it to sell hardware, and thus committed to restricting it to first-party hardware.
But the reality was that Apple had failed with Copland and had been shopping around for OSes because their OS was so bad. Apple's other spinoffs (Claris, Newton, Taligent) were also all failures, so there was really no risk that an Apple OS spinoff would get any traction. Even NeXT (the OS X we know today, and the brainchild of Steve Jobs) was on death's doorstep.
As an aside, it's truly remarkable that the amalgam of two near-dead companies (Apple, NeXT) could prove to be such a perfect mix of technology, skills, market and capital that it was able to grow into one of the world's largest and most successful companies.
Obviously it's not so simple—much of the credit goes to Jobs with the scar tissue of age and experience—but it's also true to say most of the essential puzzle pieces of success existed in one or other of these two companies. Apple had market share, loyal users, brand recognition, Jony Ive, and some good technologies; NeXT had Steve Jobs and a fully fleshed out UNIX operating system with all the trimmings.
