Could you be referring to the fact that after Steve Jobs came back to Apple in '97 with Apple's acquisition of NeXT, he used a ThinkPad running NeXTstep rather than the Mac OS until OS X came out?
Yeah, that's not enough of a "link" to drive up prices on ThinkPads of that era, sorry. (Unless you happen to get a ThinkPad directly owned by Steve, of course.)