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The extremely important difference is that now Apple has some of the best CPUs in the world.

Apple CPUs are good except most of server workloads benefit more from 128+ core monsters and not just fewer better cores.

MacOS is not a server OS either and actually maturing M* support in Linux will take years. And for inference Nvidia is years ahead of Apple.

So best Apple can hope for is some niche market.

A lot of Apple's advantages come from tightly-linked memory and compute in a fully integrated design. I somewhat doubt that advantage can fully translate to servers, where features like hot-swappable memory are standard. Maybe they should skip mid-scale and head straight to mainframes?

Hot-swappable memory is probably much more common in mainframes than mainstream servers. A typical x86 server still requires you to power it off before replacing DIMMs. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and AMD have both recently done some rather Apple-like server processors that solder CPU, GPU, and RAM to the same package/module.

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