[psydk]

My question will probably sound naïve because of my lack of knowledge of the Macintosh, but Macintosh hardware nowadays seems to be the same than PCs. So what prevent Intel, AMD or nVidia to propose a driver for this platform in the same way they do it for Linux and Windows? Is there a legal reason? A technical reason?

[inDigiNeous]

My limited guess as a OpenGL developer on Os X is that it has something to do with Apple prodividing a software OpenGL -implementation also, so maybe they don't want to pour in the work in that to support the more recent advances in OpenGL ?

Or maybe they're just focusing on the Metal -implementation, and iOS more specifically.

Currently the OpenGL stack is years behind on OS X compared to Windows or Linux, Os X supports only version 4.1 (released in 2010) with some 4.2 extensions thrown in.

I've yet to come across a good reason. If somebody knows, would be nice to know also.

[sangnoir]

> I've yet to come across a good reason. If somebody knows, would be nice to know also.

It's not a good reason, but a reason nevertheless: it's fair to say Apple likes to lock in developers to its platform[1]. Encouraging the use of Metal and discouraging OpenGL increases the lock-in effect.

1. My Google skills are failing me, but a few years ago there was a blog-post by an app developer who used to get lots of support from Apple while their featured app was iOS-exclusive. The day the app was ported it to Android, Apple stopped responding to their queries.