if apple ever creates and leases their hardware for commercial use, it might actually disrupt the google and amazon stranglehold in the compute space.
if power consumption is reduced to a minimum with their in-house arm processors, and they are highly efficient. then they could significantly undercut their competition since their costs are very low.
Given the current chip shortage issues and looooong hardware lead times it would not surprise me to see someone with more money than sense be forced to do wild things like buy retail M1 mac minis to power their infrastructure. Like Azure or Google for example, if their customers are demanding ARM instances yesterday and their engineering teams are saying in-house hardware is 2-3 years away... there's no real other choice. At least get _something_ out there for people to build on and pray you can catch up before the costs get out of hand.
I want an early Google style rack (Ikea shelf really) of M1 Mac Mini with aftermarket cooling hardware running in a closet and used as an ARM build farm somewhere.
Think bigger, I want a SoC "Server-on-a-chip" design. Integrate everything into the silicon for processing, network and basic storage I/O. I want to drop a big block on a simple 4 layer PCB and route memory, ethernet physical pins, USB, storage interface, and a power bus and that's it. The only other parts on the board are some passives. Then I want to duplicate that 64x or so on a rack sized PCB, put some cooling on the chips and board and have a super dense, super powerful cluster of ARM processors. Racks and racks and racks of these for as far as the eye can see...
Is it clear that Apple is that far ahead of whatever Neoverse based CPUs are coming? Meaning, that disruption is probably already available to Amazon soon-ish as "Graviton 3".
if power consumption is reduced to a minimum with their in-house arm processors, and they are highly efficient. then they could significantly undercut their competition since their costs are very low.