> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant

None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU and GPU is nice on paper but again there isn't much in the way of workloads where that was a significant bottleneck.

The "weird" thing Apple is doing is using normal DDR5 with a wider-than-normal memory bus to feed their GPUs instead of using GDDR or HBM. The disadvantage of this is that it has less memory bandwidth than GDDR for the same width of the memory bus. The advantage is that normal RAM costs less than GDDR. Combined with the discrete GPU market using "amount of VRAM" as the big feature for market segmentation, a Mac with >32GB of "VRAM" ended up being interesting even if it only had half as much memory bandwidth, because it still had more than a typical PC iGPU.

The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that doesn't need to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it anyway.

> Not having to copy data between the CPU and GPU is nice on paper but again there isn't much in the way of workloads where that was a significant bottleneck.

Isn't that also because that's world we have optimized workloads for?

If the common hardware had unified memory, software would have exploited that I imagine. Hardware and software is in a co-evolutionary loop.