Not everyone lives in countries where Apple prices are acceptable, even for regional developer salaries.
Ask Valve how it is going with Linux native games, or Apple with the Game Porting Toolkit.
Also that how Apple fans are so quick to forgive shanky keyboard and swelling battery experiences at premium prices.
Yes they are primarily iDevices company nowadays, which yet again isn't that big when looking into worldwide market share.
And their terminal is one of the very few that respect double-wide and double-height DEC modes, which work great for scripts.
Not everyone across the globe has the privilege of having corporate issued Macs, hence Windows rules the desktop, when their own wallets are asked upon.
In fact, many companies have laptops pools for macOS devices, mostly used during iDevices projects, only assigned to teams members if they are on such a project.
Or even the workflow of using cross platform frameworks like Flutter, MAUI, React Native and co, with a shared Mac mini for iDevice builds.
Those rough around the edges are unacceptable for a device that costs several month salaries above the competition.
It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.
Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.
I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.
That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.
Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it.
Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.
The Mac Studio is on par with the best gear out there for similar pricing. What kind of professional are we talking about here?
I don't think he intends to make a DGX Pod out of Macs, but the Studio is barely scalable. If we still had Mac Pro PCIe, then at least you could use that for interconnect. Thunderbolt RDMA is such a low pittance that Apple is basically only competing against novelty hardware like the DGX Spark.
Which kind of hints towards the fact that they could definitely have supported OpenGL in a way that project like MoltenVK work. The OpenGL standard is frozen in time, last update was in 2017. It's not too late.
The decision not so support modern OpenGL is why so much engineering/3D/CAD/gaming software is suck on the windows platform. There is no true cross-platform graphics standard anymore. WebGPU might be our last hope.
The decision not to support OpenGL is probably because the API isn’t actually very modern and requires the driver to reconstruct what the user code wants. The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.
In any case, most game studios don't care, because Render-Hardware-Interface (RHI) is a thing since the home computing revolution.
The only platform where running WebGL on top of Vulkan would make sense is Linux, and on Linux both the GL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape via the MESA project (e.g. there's little incentive to switch from a perfectly fine OpenGL driver to Vulkan for implementing WebGL), especially since the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least).
...and also on Windows (where WebGL runs on top of D3D). AFAIK Linux is the only platform where browsers actually use OpenGL to implement WebGL.