The alternate timeline where sometime in late 200x Apple buys Sun (instead of Oracle) and still invests in Unixy datacenter things, ZFS, and similar tech that Sun was good at, and use it to build high quality services and hardware is a fun thought experiment to explore.
Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.
Apple was doing some half-hearted enterprise-y efforts at the time like the Xserve. As an IT industry analyst at the time I got invited for various briefings related to such things. However, as you note, once the iPhone in particular really took off, Apple pretty much stopped pretending to be anything other than a consumer company, especially after BYOD became the norm.
Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.