The bandwidth of rdma over thunderbolt is so much faster (and lower latency) than Apple's system of mostly-wireless devices, I can't see how any learnings here would transfer.

You're thinking, "You can't put modern models on that sort of distributed compute network", which is technically correct.

I was thinking, "How could we package or run these kinds of large models or workloads across a consumer's distributed compute?" The Engineer in me got as far as "Enumerate devices on network via mDNS or Bonjour, compare keys against iCloud device keys or otherwise perform authentication, share utilization telemetry and permit workload scheduling/balance" before I realized that's probably what they're testing here to a degree, even if they're using RDMA.