They didn’t drop the ball at all?

They want to be able to sell handsets, desktops and laptops to their customer base.

Pursing a product line that would consume the finite amount of silicon manufacturing resources away from that user base would be corporate suicide.

Even nvidia has all but dropped support for its traditional gaming customer base to satisfy its new strategy.

At any rate, the local inference capabilities are only going to get cheaper and more accessible over the coming years, and Apple are probably better placed than anyone to make it happen.