> left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.