They do have an interesting cpu, but the apple target market isn't engineers/scientists/gamers so they traditionally have not done anything interesting with respect to ml and gpu kinds of things. The closest is video.
I think things might get interesting with an arm mac pro if they can add a lot of cores. I wonder if they will add PCIe slots so they can collaborate with other hardware manufacturers, or if they will navel-gaze some more and close it off.
The machine literally has a component in it called a neural engine which Apple advertises as:
> In fact, with a powerful 8‑core GPU, machine learning accelerators, and the Neural Engine, the entire M1 chip is designed to excel at machine learning.
(https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/)
So asking "how well does that really perform" seems like precisely the right question, and to me it'd seem very clear Apple wants a piece of that market.
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/updates/ml-compute-trainin...
As for general targeting of engineers the history of MBP pretty shows that they don't really care. Things like virtual escape key on the touchbar, shitty keyboards with sticking keys, hardware designed to not be reparable, and more recently, releasing the M1 models with a spotty backwards compatibility of software out the door is really not something that would be done if you were targeting tech minded people.
Also these laptops have 8 CPU cores (4 high performance, 4 high efficiency) and 8 entirely separate GPU cores. It's a powerhouse of multiprocessing, especially when you consider it's in a laptop that gets 20 hours of real battery life.
It's also fully bidirectional, allowing for the same speed in the other direction at the same time. Thunderbolt is capped at 40Gb/s total bandwidth.