The philosophy is working as it often does in the early days/years of a technology. The customers for this have problems at an entirely different scale. It's

The philosophy is working as it often does in the early days/years of a technology. The customers for this have problems at an entirely different scale. It's worth it for them to drop millions on hardware and potentially millions more to (re)write the software as needed. Sure, they'd prefer to be buying commodity hardware with standardized APIs. But since that doesn't currently exist for this class of performance, they'll pay up. People did the same back in the days of Cray/SGI/Lisp Machines and so on. These custom solutions can be quite profitable until the competition gets to the 'good enough' stage and then orders start drying up. If you're looking for standardized hardware and software for AI, Apple is the wrong platform to be on. I'm fairly confident it won't be happening there. (I don't say that to be a hater: see the direction they've gone re: GPU APIs... it's just Apple being Apple)