Apple is a consumer product company. “There’s a lot of money in selling silicon to other companies therefore Apple should have pivoted to selling silicon to other companies” is a weird fantasy-land idea of how businesses work.

Idk maybe it’s legit if your only view of the world is through capital and, like, financial narratives. But it’s not how Apple has ever worked, and very very few consumer companies would attempt that kind of switch let alone make the switch successfully.

It's not a fantasy-land idea at all. Apple has already tried penetrating the datacenter before, they've proven they can ship a product to market if they want to. They just don't. They don't want to support Nvidia drivers or complex GPGPU primatives or non-raster GPU architectures or cross-platform acceleration libraries. Which is frankly an braindead decision from the opportunity cost side of things; if your consumers don't care, why not deliver what developers want?

Apple can have their cake and eat it here. If they reacted fast enough (eg. ~2018) then they could have had a CUDA competitor in-time for the crypto and AI craze - that's a fact! But they missed out on those markets because they had their blinders on, dead-to-rights focused on the consumer market they're losing control over. It's starting to verge on pathetic how gimped the Mac is for a "real computer" product.