In the late-1980s, when Apple was using Motorola 68000 series chips, and considering its next step, Intel co-founder Andy Grove tried to convince the company to migrate to Intel chips, Sculley told a standing-room-only crowd at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, held at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.

An experienced team from Apple studied the idea but turned it down.

Apple concluded that Intel's Cisc (Complex Instruction Set Computer) architecture ultimately would not be able to compete against Risc (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processors, which had a more advanced instruction set, he says. Apple later adopted Risc.

"That is probably one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made, not going to the Intel platform," says Sculley, Apple's former chairman and CEO, now a partner in New York investment firm Sculley Brothers.

"As it turned out, Intel was able to keep its Cisc architecture and bring the Risc instruction set into it. What Apple had underestimated was the power of Intel's overall system as a manufacturer, bringing billions of dollars to bear on the problem, and solving it through evolution, Sculley says.

Had it gone to the Intel platform, Apple would have had more options, he adds.

For one thing, not embracing the endless commoditisation of Intel architecture chips meant that Apple could not compete on price against "the Dells of the world," he continues. The die was cast. Apple took another path, and ended up a different kind of company, Sculley concludes. A smaller one, perhaps.