The version of this story I saw was based on Geekbench scores. Browsing Geekbench results, I noticed that identical CPUs had scores that varied by huge amounts, as much as 2x. That may be a reflection of a real phenomenon, but it's not what I expect from a "CPU benchmark."
Geekbench also claims to model real-world applications, and I wonder what that means for comparing a phone and a laptop. Obviously there aren't so many apps that run the same way on both platforms. I wouldn't have any trouble believing, for example, that the CPU and video display system on a phone were superbly and efficiently integrated, far more so than in a desktop or laptop, and that would show up in an application benchmark. But I'd be surprised if a phone CPU can really get through many threads of branchy code faster than a big high-consumption part with giant caches can.
Anyway, I'm dubious about the Geekbench thing and I wonder if there are other measurements you have in mind.
Consuming your own output isn't good for margins, and like many large-scale providers, you must acknowledge vanity hardware isn't any faster than bare motherboards in a rack. The more bare-bones the better.
The XServe and friends were intended for small-scale deployments. They did a few partnerships to build clusters of them for HPC but that was largely a demonstration, not a target customer base.
Before the Xserve there was the Apple Network Server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server
Intel has a huge competitive advantage here in the bulk of the market, but ARM will find an opening as well. They'll probably coexist for some time.
I don't know about that. I recently switched from Apple hardware to chromebook hardware because the chromebook was under $200. I just couldn't justify the extra cost.
There's no indication of a switch to ARM-only from any vendor I'm aware of. Lenovo et al. are still releasing new x86-based Chromebooks.
Proprietary hardware is a hard sale for anyone these days but in Apple's case it's even harder because their previous attempts left many shops with a disinclination to ever use them again. It'd take a serious commitment to forget the era where you had to beg for OS X Server bugfixes by saying they were preventing the purchase of n Macs.