The limited gaming available on a 5k iMac was great while I had one. Civilization, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft... Jaw dropping, but barely scratching the surface of what Apple could do if they gave some love to the market.
"But can't everyone just implement our Metal API? It's been so successful, it's the best, you'll love it" No. No we don't love it. Please just implement WebGL2. Thanks.
"But we neglected OpenGL for years, even though our pro users have been begging for updates, and we think Metal is the best, you'll love it".
No. We want OpenGL updates. We are pros, and you promised us for years OpenGL updates. This is why there are almost 0.0% of our apps released on Macos with Metal.
"But we released the new macbook pro with an AMD card. We haven't really been working on OpenCL, but use that. You'll love it".
No, we want CUDA. We are pros, and we told you we wanted CUDA. It's what we use, because you stopped caring about OpenCL.
"I know we said we were serious about pro models, and that there would be a new mac pro, but here is the same one with a minor update. You'll love it. It's the best."
No.
"But we're listening."
No, you're bloody not.
Apple has no market dominance in the graphics/compute domain and they want people to spend time and energy porting to a locked-in proprietary API when they haven't even had success getting people to use cross-platform open APIs like OpenGL/CL? Madness.
Yes, the iPhone gives them all the market power they need with some developers, even many devlopers. But others don't care about the iPhone for various reasons. Those developers, grumble, moan and eventually buy computers that aren't Macs. And when those developers make great things they're outside of Apple's ecosystem, encouraging other developers and customers to leave it as well...
"Market power" is fairly meaningless when you support multiple platforms. Most games ported to Apple platforms use OpenGL; using Metal would restrict their market significantly. And expensive high-end software has better support on platforms where you can use expensive high-end GPUs and compute, and that's not today's Apple hardware. Metal is a non-starter for a very large number of people, and they need to get their OpenGL and Vulkan support up to par or many of us will cease supporting Apple platforms entirely.