Apple could dominate this niche if they decided, for a while until prices fall, to eat some margin and bump up RAM in high end models. Couple that with a new M series chip with even faster AI performance.

It’s not a huge niche but it’s an influential one. They’d get the engineers and CXOs of AI ventures and a lot of academics and hobbyists.

For the platform it would keep them cemented as the high end vendor. In the long term it would position them to take advantage of any software or training breakthroughs that deliver frontier model performance at that scale.