Sure, because the personal computer workstation market is
exactly the same as the hyper-luxury supercar market. All the people here wanting more than 256GB of RAM or PCIe GPUs are
clearly just rock stars, sports personalities and children of oil magnates with bottomless pockets, who want something to turn heads when they roll up at the exclusive country club, pick up important clients from the airport or occasionally get their car freighted out to the Nurburgring (sp?) for a track day. ...and designing a custom processor die and fabricating it in tiny numbers is
exactly the same as hand-building a few custom engines. Not.
Rather, I'm pretty confident that the "real workstation users" have real, practical problems to solve as part of their work, and while they can justify expensive hardware in terms of their business turnover, that doesn't mean they have heaps of Daddy's money or sports sponsorship income to blow on status symbols... and
maybe people see the Bugatti doing 250mph (or whatever) on Top Gear and go out and buy VW Golfs in response, maybe it's worth it for a trickle-down of new tech, patents and attracting top designers and engineers - or maybe its all some complex tax write-off scheme that only an accountant can explain.
Apple's most successful "halo products" have bean their
cheaper lines, like the iPad and iPhone, without which the Mac would probably have vanished long ago, and the technology seems to trickle
up from those items (the whole of Apple Silicon is basically about scaling up mobile tech to laptops and desktops). Their closest thing to a "supercar" so far is probably the 2019 Mac Pro - and ask anybody who
isn't already a Mac fan about the Mac Pro and all you'll get is snide remarks about $800 wheels, so as a halo it's pretty lousy. The whole "real vs. fake workstation user" argument right here is pretty much evidence that people who don't need a Mac Pro don't
get why it costs what it does.
Even the 2019 Mac Pro - folks,
it's just a Xeon-W/PCIe system using existing chipsets from Intel (CPU) AMD (GPU) - who all have other, far larger markets for those chips - with an extra row of connectors to route power and Thunderbolt between PCIe slots. The one bit of custom Apple silicon is the T2 chip which had already been developed and manufactured in huge quantities for everything from the MacBook Air up. Creating a substantially new processor (rather than some sort of multi-Mx Max) would be a major departure for Apple, with no particular guarantee that it would outperform a Xeon or Threadripper driving the same AMD GPUs from the same DDR5 RAM.
Note that I wasn't saying that Apple won't/can't make some sort of new high-end Mac, just that it would be very hard & expensive to produce a direct replacement for the 2019 Mac Pro market. If Apple want a "halo" computer they could sponsor a scientific supercomputer based on grids of Mx Ultras, or make 1U Mx Ultra "compute modules" for scalable cloud computing, and maybe set some speed records - but what such systems have in common is that they'd probably be pretty unimpressive when running ProTools or Davinci....
People who buy 16-cylinder Bugattis aren't generally worried about mileage
