Academics might buy in, but they're a small market and still fairly easy to poach with quality server hardware. You may be right about Apple using them for clou

Academics might buy in, but they're a small market and still fairly easy to poach with quality server hardware. You may be right about Apple using them for cloud inferencing though, seeing how they'd rather pound sand than patch up their relationship with Nvidia. Whichever way you look at it though, neither of those are really opportunities. Apple boxed themselves into the consumer market, and now has to compete with professionally-priced products.