Sure. Haswell CPUs from 2014 are "there" for inference if they have AVX support and 8gb of RAM. Inferencing isn't the problem though, not on M1 or Macbooks from 2016. Scaling a desirable (and hopefully open) GPGPU programming interface is. This is bottlenecked by both hardware and software decisions Apple has made, making a "home grown" competitive model much more unlikely in my eyes.
I agree that there is an incentive to put AI models on your OS. I just don't think Apple can own the whole stack if they want to play ball right now.