Microsoft needs Apple as a strong competitor. Otherwise they will be declared a monopoly and broken up by regulators. Microsoft was smart to use OpenAI as a proxy for this deal.
LOL!
I would love to see your evidence that Apple's new AI offering will be running on Microsoft's infrastructure.
OpenAI models run on Azure infrastructure. Apple is just a client and will be paying Microsoft via OpenAI to run it.
Apple also has their own models running on their own infrastructure. I'm not saying that Microsoft or OpenAI has anything to do with that.
Microsoft was a breakup risk back when all that existed were computers and they had 95+% market share.