[mikepavone]

> What I remember happening was that Apple was all-in on helping Khronos come up with what would eventually become Vulkan, but Khronos kept dragging their feet on getting something released. Apple finally got fed up and said, "We need something shipping and we need it now." So they just went off and did it themselves.

This is not really how it happened. AMD released Mantle back in 2013 based off their experience with game console specific APIs. From what I remember, AMD expressed some interest in Mantle becoming a cross-vendor standard, but were a bit wishy-washy early on. GDC 2014 then saw some AMD talks on Mantle, the announcement of DirectX 12 from Microsoft and the AZDO talk. Apple then announced Metal in June of that year. The "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative" kicked off around that same time with a public call for participation in August. Apple did join the working group at some point (they're one of the many companies listed in a slide from the announcement presentation), but I don't see any evidence that they were ever a major player in the standard.

Now obviously, Vulkan was not an option for Apple in 2014 when they announced Metal since the project hadn't really gotten started yet, but I don't see any evidence that they pushed Khronos to get started on a replacement for OpenGL earlier either. They were also lagging behind on OpenGL support for years before they announced Metal (they stopped at 4.1 which was released in 2010) and notably almost none of the techniques presented in the AZDO talk worked on Mac OS for this reason. I'm sure part of the reason they decided to go their own way with Metal is that you can move faster as a single company, but I think it would be naive to assume that making cross-platform development between iOS and Android harder wasn't a factor.

[pjmlp]

Additionally given how Long Peaks went, had it not been for AMD giving Mantle to Khronos, they would still be arguing to this day how OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like.