[nbardy]

Why does apple want to make this hardware hard to access?

What actual benefits do they get?

I guess they can have their own models run faster than the competition on their hardware? But they don't even really have anything that consumers use on the ANE as far as I can tell and local LLMs are taking off on macs and could really benefit from this

[owlbite]

I suspect main benefits are they have no need to maintain the hardware or software for any longer than it makes sense for their own needs, and don't have to handhold users through a constantly evolving minefield of performance and technical capabilities.