I don't get it. You can literally go buy it right now. You have been able to buy it for months and months by getting an Ipad. If you are saying you can't buy it because it's used inside a product then the same goes for basically all mobile processors. I can't "buy" an AMD Ryzen HX 370. I can't buy an Intel Core Ultra 258V. And neither can I "buy" a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-80-100. This has never even been a factor.
Why does it matter that they aren't available to OEMs? This is moving the goalpost from your original argument.
The second part of your argument is currently correct but that will change shortly. There is no reason to lock into the apple ecosystem. M4 support is underway in Linux though not yet available. You can easily use a Mac mini as a server running Linux.
>This is moving the goalpost from your original argument.
No, them only being available as part of Apple products and thus not on the CPU market was my original point. I should probably have been more explicit in my original comments. I don't believe I have been moving goalposts, but your interpretation of the point I was trying to make might have changed.
You are correct, the situation is similar for most mobile processors. They are unavailable on the market for consumers looking to build a system.
Apple goes one step further though: M processors aren't just unavailable to consumers, there's also no way for OEMs to build systems using these chips. In this point they differ significantly from the examples you mentioned. For people that do not want to buy into the Apple ecosystem, M chips are effectively not on the market, and benchmark comparisons to desktop or server CPUs are meaningless.