Where I disagree with you, though, is why do you want consolidation of expertise into a single silo?
I would prefer better competition and consumer choice. As many point out...
* With Windows, you are beholden to Microsoft and the control they exert over Windows 10, including stuffing ads into your start menu or even popping up alerts over your taskbar insisting that you try Edge.
* With Linux, you have all of the choice, but sometimes a steeper learning curve. Depending on the kinds of gaming you prefer, it's a non-starter.
* With Apple, they make all the choices for you, and as long as you are OK with their choices, you're a happy camper. If you don't like their choices (or depending on the kinds of gaming you prefer) it's a non-starter.
There's a constant tug-of-war between unity and choice. If there was one central way of making games that worked across operating systems, you might have better choices between Windows, Linux and MacOS, but you'd be stuck with whoever controls the game standard.
So back to the central point, I'd be happy for Apple to be a dominant low-level hardware maker... if it wasn't stuck inside their walled garden. I'd much rather have three solid CPU makers (or more) that were compatible with several operating systems, each with support for Unity, Unreal, etc. not to mention things like CUDA.
I use Windows 10 and never experienced any of those after turning them off after a fresh install
Yes, you can unpin, disable Suggestions, etc and it does improve the experience, but the default behavior is intrusive.
You meant this as a joke, didn't you?
Just in case you didn't: Apple already is a, if not the hardware giant - it became the first trillion-dollar company a year ago and just passed the $2 trillion mark in August.
Apple develops and manufacturers a lot of hardware (one of the few positive things I'll plug them for). I would definitely consider them a generic "hardware giant" in that context. Much of this hardware are phones, watches, laptops, and peripherals. I know their server/datacenter market is traditionally pretty slim but don't know what it typically looks like. I know AWS recently announced Mac EC2 instances[1]. The fact EC2 has been so dominant and Apple hardware in EC2 is just now arriving gives much merit that they're not in that much demand in datacenters. I work in research and have only encountered a handful of instances where projects interfaced with Apple hardware (especially in a datacenter) but there's no reason that couldn't shift given Apple's capital and talent pool that already exists.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-bu...
They're a luxury brand and they make money off of selling personal lifestyle computers. Often good quality, and, yes, the M1 looks fantastic (literally just bought my wife a new M1 MacBook Air) but this is a company that doesn't even really sell a commodity desktop machine. I cannot see them going head to head against SuperMicro.
Maybe, _maybe_, they'd license M1 out, but I doubt it.