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by Xixi 3416 days ago
Not the person to whom you are asking, but this is my perception of Apple.

The state of OpenGL will never improve: if you've followed Apple at any point over the last 25 years, it's pretty clear that they disengage very quickly from any technology that is starting to look deprecated/not the future. It works for hardware and software: first iMac with only USB and Ethernet, dropping the floppy drive, dropping CD/DVD drives, avoiding Blue-Ray entirely [1], only USB-C on last MacBook Pro, flash, etc. So my opinion is that OpenGL will never be developed further at Apple. They will probably drop all OpenGL support at some point in the next few years.

The other thing that is clear is that Apple doesn't like having their hands tied by third parties. The lack of adequate Kaby Lake processors for the launch of the last MacBook Pro, and the subsequent heat/hatred directed towards Apple because of it [2], is probably making quite a few people think that at some point they will really have to move the whole Mac line to Apple made ARM processors.

Apple started to ship a working Metal implementation to iOS developers before Vulkan was more than a draft [3]. This freedom to move at their own pace is worth a lot to Apple. Vulkan is a great piece of technology, but I don't have high hopes for it to be supported by Apple anytime soon.

[1] There were some licensing issues there, but had Apple thought the future of media consumption to be BR I'm sure they would have found a comprise. Instead they found an excuse to promote streaming / the Apple TV.

[2] Including on HN, where I would have thought the average reader to be a little bit more sophisticated on these technical matters.

[3] I don't have the exact timeline in head, so I might be wrong.

Edit: typo