I agree with you, even if many of the pundits say that Apple was left in the dust.
At some point, the real cost of inference/intelligence is going to come due, and the existing open source models will be good enough for 95% of tasks users want (or training their own model(s) will be inexpensive for Apple).
Apple will be there, as usual, to provide secure, on-device, faster inference that the vast majority of their customers will be fine with. Let everyone incur the R&D costs.
The real cost of inference? It's dirt cheap.
Look at what it costs to serve Kimi K3.1 Pro on a B300. It suggests margins of 98-99% at API prices for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Should the shortages for memory and GPUs ever improve, this will only become much cheaper, won't it?
That said, R&D is another story.