> The Mac Pro could have fit that niche, but Tim Cook chose to depreciate it instead of letting the PCIe connectors be used with Nvidia cards. He cut off Apple's nose to spite Nvidia's face.

Apple Silicon only has support for 16k pages via DART, rather than the 4k pages typically used by AMD/Nvidia. The requirement to coordinate a major change of drivers to understand 16k pages is why both PCIe GPU and eGPU do not work (or rather, did not work - TinyGPU is a compatibility layer that adds eGPU support and is used for AI workflows).

The Mac Pro's biggest redeeming feature for a data center was that it was rack-mountable. The ARM version was still mostly an empty case. It remained mostly for its ability to support PCIe cards for video and audio production use cases, such as live broadcasting.

> especially since they're crawling back to Nvidia to license their interconnect

Licensing the interconnect for broader compatibility. They support other interconnects as well.