If we're being frank here, Apple's AI strategy lags behind Nvidia, AMD and even Google. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD ships CDNA, Google has the TPU family, and Apple... well, Apple discontinued the rackmount Mac Pro, forfeit the HPC ARM datacenter to Nvidia's Grace CPUs, refuses to sign CUDA drivers, and spent half a decade designing raster GPUs instead of GPGPUs.

All of their competition has real inference and training stacks. Apple ships an iGPU and a smartphone NPU, they're reliant on Nvidia and Google hardware to deliver Apple Intelligence.

Saying they are lagging assumes they are in the same race

They aren’t

Apple is a high net worth consumer technology integrator that focuses on highest coherence user experience. They pick the most efficient stable technology, integrate it and sell the package

Apple only needs to lead in precisely that they don’t need to lead in literally anything else

in fact if they tried to lead in those other things they would give up their integration capacity