They don't really have a solution for desktop. These are still mobile/laptop chips. Don't get me wrong: these are insanely brilliant paradigm-changing chips that are more than enough for the majority of people.
However, despite all the marketing it still remains to be seen whether they can transition into desktop/workstation chips with these. Especially at a reasonable price.
They are desktop only, but conceptually they're still much more like mobile chips. With M-series CPUs Apple is either targeting limited power consumption instead of going for max performance (which is a characteristic of mobile chips), or the chips just does not scale to high-end x86 territory despite any possible power consumption increase.
Either way, as soon as power consumption does not matter, price-performance (well, even both price _or_ performance, separately) wise M-series is not competitive with top x86 CPUs.
Yes it is based on a mobile optimized architecture but M2 Ultra is scoring ~90% as high as the top model Intel i9-13900KS on Geekbench 6. It's up there with Intels best. And it's keeping up on the CPU side while having a massive GPU bolted on the die.
One thing to note regarding the M2 Ultra (from Apple marketing):
"It has dedicated, hardware-enabled H. 264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video — far more than any PC chip can do."
Would need an expensive GPU or hardware accelerator to match that capability on the Intel side. The companies that use these machines probably don't even consider the $500 cost difference versus a Dell Precision workstation or whatever.
The Mac Pro, Mac Studio, Mac Mini, and iMac are basically how Apple covers that market. The Mac Pro is pretty much unobtainable on a budget and definitely aimed at a niche market (high end video/3D graphics production). The Mac Studio is actually pretty nice as a high end work station. The mac mini kind of stops where the Mac Studio begins in terms of performance. If you are maxing out the specs on that, you might be better off getting the entry model Mac Studio. And an imac is what you use if you don't care about performance that much.
But the point is that all of these have a market and some people are spending big on this. I talked to one of my friends recently who runs a high tech printing company and they spent some money on a mac studio recently for doing graphics work. Worth the money according to him.
I have a 14" macbook pro (M1). It's great. I do some flight simuluation on it occasionally with X-plane 12. That runs pretty smooth on this thing and it's one of the few things I have that actually gets this laptop warm.
Apple did a great job of getting great performance with modest power budgets. Comparing their products to water cooled monstrosities is not really that interesting.
One that millions of people enjoy, and more are getting into every year passing. Young people who were raised with already decent graphics will not downgrade to 10 years older graphic quality and will thus buy decent gaming PC.
It is actually the market that Apple has chosen that is more niche.
About 80% of Mac sales are laptops (a lot of which are status symbol/ rich executive computer type) so it really does not leave a lot of customers that are into computers.
I believe they made that choice for both historical reasons and trying to maximize profits. But I think they are wrong, and it will bite them eventually. There is no reason a powerful desktop couldn't be just as good at video editing. Actually, the gaming desktops tend to be pretty good at video production too, it just does not have the software Apple has...
However, despite all the marketing it still remains to be seen whether they can transition into desktop/workstation chips with these. Especially at a reasonable price.