I get where you're coming from. It's par for the course on Apple's behalf to push this stuff away in lieu of their own, high-level implementation, but I also think that behavior puts them at an impasse. People who want to use this hardware for arbitrary purposes are unable to do so. Apple is unwilling to do it because they want their hand on the "API valve" so to speak. In a case where absolutist rhetoric is being used on either side, I think this is pretty expected. If we're ultimately boiling this down to "having choices" vs "not having choices" though, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect the most valuable company in the world to go the extra mile and offer both choices to their users and developers.

Or not. It's their hardware, they just won't be selling any Macs to me with that mindset. The only thing that irks me is when people take the bullet for Apple like a multi-trillion dollar corporation needs more people justifying their lack of interoperability.

Perhaps the "high-level access only" ideology extends to policy considerations as well. End-users appear to have no shortage of time or ideas to make AI trip over its shadow in ways that may have unfortunate policy implications for corporations with uncomfortably-large social and political footprints (where "footprint" represents "potential impact" and does not indicate extant specifics).

In much the same way the App Store is an infuriating shh-don't-call-it-censorship bottleneck that gives Apple total and final control over what your (sorry, Apple's) devices can do, I wonder if political considerations represents a portion of Apple's motivation to keep things reasonably locked down. Obviously Apple can just kick apps it doesn't like out of the App Store, and binaries that would need to be downloaded and run directly on Macs is exceedingly unlikely to go viral to the same extent, so perhaps I'm overthinking things to the point of paranoia.