[burlesona]

I'm not sure it's that simple when you're talking about needing to evolve hardware design and software toolkit together. NVidia has been ahead of everyone else largely because they skip all the coordination overhead and design CUDA to just work on their hardware, and put their energy into making that hardware + software combination better and better without regard for what everyone else is doing. If Apple wants to compete it's hard to see how they could without adopting a similar approach.

What I think is more realistic is that things like Vulcan will have Metal and CUDA adapters, etc., and that developers who don't need bleeding edge performance as much as they need broad compatibility will be able to use that.

In other words it's the same tradeoff as we've seen in software for decades -- you can write a fully-optimised native application per operating system, or you can use a cross-platform toolkit (increasingly the web) which can do a nice job but lacks some of the power and polish that a native application can deliver.