Apple’s icy relationship with Nvidia started right around when CUDA came into existence and before Metal ever existed. Nvidia created tensions between Apple and Intel and later handed Apple the headache of a class action lawsuit by knowingly shipping faulty GPUs.

I think Apple Silicon and Metal vs CUDA might have been a strategic reason for not repairing that relationship but that came years later.

> […] Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers).

Heck, Nvidia still ships Solaris drivers:

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

I guess now that they have the infrastructure for these more niches OSes, it's not too hard to just keep going (especially if the kernel APIs are relatively stable).

Apple doesn't arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.

And up until now there hasn't been a Mac Nvidia could even sell graphics cards for.

Even now Mac Pro users will be such a tiny segment it's probably not worth the effort.