Here are my 8 candidates, ripe for an Apple takeover, baring any regulatory intervention. I have no insider knowledge and full expect Apple to hoard it’s money during the economic downturn, but wouldn’t it be cool if…

The Obvious

Dell – A huge rival, and certainly would give them a boot in market share. But what would be the point? 90% of existing Dell customers wouldn’t buy a Mac unless it was at Dell prices. Apple’s only choice would to ship a version of OS X for Dell boxes, there’s no value, it would just increase market share for the other low cost PC makers. Odds: 20/1

Sun Microsystems – Apple and Sun have long been linked but it recent months Apple has been cast as the aggressor. Technology-wise Apple could do far worse that Sun; Solaris, SPARC, Java, DTrace, MySQL the list goes on and on. Apple are desperate to break the Enterprise market, this would give them a big leg up. Odds: 5/1

Palm – Again, I see little point to this acquisition an instant doubling of there Enterprise phone market, but it certainly wouldn’t double iPhone sales. Palm (much like Apple) have a hardcore of supporters that would be unwilling to move to the iPhone. Again the only route for Apple would be iPhone OS for Palm devices, an interesting proposition. Odds: 15/1

The Not So Obvious

EA – Games are almost important to Apple, with the enviable side-effect of the App Store being a massive games market for the iPhone Apple is ideally placed to become a industry leader. It has long puzzled me why Apple has never got a foothold in the games market? Maybe because they let Microsoft buy the companies making Mac games. But I digress, EA would bring some great titles to the Mac and iPhone/iPod, Apple could start to challenge Sony and Nintendo; a beefed up Apple TV that can play (proper) games, handhelds that interact seamlessly and Desktops and Laptops with hundreds of titles! Apple would rule the living room. Odds: 10/1

Nintendo – This is just a quickie; Wii technology, Japan, Nintendo DS market share plus all the reasons listed above. Odds: 25/1

AMD – Apple have shown their willingness to get their hands dirty when it comes to chip design so how about AMD. Production, design, technology, brains. They would get all this with AMD, plus cheeper chips for desktops etc. Intel would not be happy and it would take some effort to get OS X optimized for AMD. Odds: 18/1

Boxee – Lets face it Apple TV hasn’t lived up to it potential, maybe it’s a slow burner. Version 2.0 of the software was a massive step forward, but buying Boxee would be a quantum leap! Couple this with an iPhone emulator so you can play App Store games and you getting close to a game changer. My advice to Apple would be to give away Apple TV’s with iPhone contracts on AT&T, T-Mobile etc, it needs market share but more importantly mindshare. Include a digital TV receiver and recording functionality and your away. Odds: 10/1

The Crazy

Twitter - http://valleywag.gawker.com/5240350/could-apple-buy-twitter You have to Ask you self one question? Why? And the answer can only be iPhone. But that only throws up more questions? iPhone and Mac OS X already have a billion clients, the only only way they could have a strategical advantage would be to close the API to not iPhone/Mac OS X clients. Piss off a lot of people and Kill Twitter… never going to happen 10,000/1

Adobe – have a license to print money with Photoshop, Apple would do well to drop the price and cancel the PC version. Incorporating features into iPhoto and Mobile Me (online). In addition they would control Flash/Flex and have a jump on Microsoft’s Silverlight. Flash for the iPhone would make some people very happy too. In addition, allowing App Store application to be written in Flash would increase the inventory 10 fold, it’s an attractive idea for 1000’s for Flash developers (that would otherwise never touch iPhone/iPod development) and Apple. Odds: 50/1