Yes, but not with their GPU architecture. Apple's big bet was on low-power NPU hardware, assuming the compute cost of inference would go down as the field progressed. This was the wrong bet - LLMs and other AIs have scaled up better than they scaled down.
> How has it not already made that decision? What would prevent Apple from making that decision?
I mean, for one, Apple is famously stubborn. They're the last ones to admit they're wrong whenever they make a mistake, presumably admitting that the NPU is wasted silicon would be a mea-culpa for their AI stance. It's also easier to wait for a new generation of Apple Silicon to overhaul the architecture, rather than driving a generational split as soon as the problem is identified.
As for what's preventing them, I don't think there's anything insurmountable. But logically it might not make sense to adopt Nvidia's strategy even if it's better. Apple can't neccessarily block Nvidia from buying the same nodes they get from TSMC, so they'd have to out-design Nvidia if they wanted to compete on their merits. Even then, since Apple doesn't support OpenCL it's not guaranteed that they would replace CUDA. It would just be another proprietary runtime for vendors to choose from.
> Can you give an example of where Metal wants you to write something yourself whereas CUDA is pre-rolled?
Not exhaustively, no. Some of them are performance-optimized kernels like cuSPARSE, some others are primative sets like cuDNN, others yet are graph and signal processing libraries with built-out support for industrial applications.
To Apple's credit, they've definitely started hardware-accelerating the important stuff like FFT and ray tracing. But Nvidia still has a decade of lead time that Apple spent shopping around with AMD for other solutions. The head-start CUDA has is so great that I don't think Apple can seriously respond unless the executives light a fire under their ass to make some changes. It will be an "immovable rock versus an unstoppable force" decision for Apple's board of directors.