They don't need the entire mac. Their cost per Max chip is probably $200-300 which beats the 4090 by a massive margin and each chip can do more than a 4090 because it also has a CPU onboard.

4090 peaks out at around 550w which means they can run 5+ of their Max chips in the same power budget.

A 4090 is $2000. Apple can probably get 5 chips on a custom motherboard for that cost. They'll use the same amount of power, but get a lot more raw compute.

The M2 is a chip designed to be in a laptop (and it is quite powerful given its low power consumption). Presumedly they have a different chip or at least completely different configuration (RAM, network, etc.) in their data centers.

Of course you do, Apple's selling mobile SOC's not high end cards. That doesn't mean they're incapable of making them for the right application. You don't seriously think the server farms running on M4 Pro Max chips do you...

Maybe. It is not really obvious how much you for the AI accellerator part of their offerings. For example the chips in iPhones are quite powerful even adjusted for price. However for some cases - like the max chip in the macbooks or the extra ram - their pricing seems high - maybe even nvidia high.

That's from HPE, for an Apollo 6500.