How does that dovetail with Apple’s strengths as a vertically integrated consumer electronics company? What would they bring to the table that would help them compete with the other cloud players? Amazon had first mover advantage and Microsoft had a large enterprise base to draw from and an inside and outside enterprise sales force. Apple has none of that. Google is struggling in the cloud with large companies partially because of no enterprise sales experience and no reputation in the enterprise. Apple would be even less competitive.
I can see that this is the obvious reason why Apple is not doing this. It is a short-sighted view though. Is the Mac Pro (MacBook Pro, etc) a consumer electronics product? Not really. So why do they provide it? Yeah. Same reason they should provide a cloud based on Metal.