What I would really benefit from is updated OpenGL support. Right now, MacOS X is the lowest common denominator, with all the other platforms having 4.5+ as standard. I can upgrade to that with ease. But I'm never going to be able to justify rewriting the stuff with Metal, because it would mean a complete parallel implementation just for MacOS, since we would need to retain OpenGL everywhere else.
Vendor-specific graphics APIs are, for the most part, a legacy of the past which we were lucky to escape from. Apple creating Metal is an anachronism, and I don't think it will have a long life unless they make it portable.
Do you have any examples of things using it?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vainglory/id671464704?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sky-gamblers-storm-raiders/i...
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/radiation-island/id923760656...
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/asphalt-8-airborne/id6103919...
Adobe After Effects
https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/after-effects-cc-2015-...
Adobe Premier Pro
https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/up-next-for-premiere-p...
I don't know what percentage of Unity/UE4 Mac & iOS games have Metal enabled, but it is potentially a very large number.
That's the thing about Metal -- as long as common libraries and game engines add support for it, most developers won't have to do much additional work to use it. Only people who are writing their own graphics engine from scratch would need to learn it.
Not everyone is going to spend resources on implementing a redundant API. Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks by not supporting OpenGL and Vulkan.
Example: https://www.winehq.org//wwn/404
> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.
Well that says it all, even if Apple had an up to date OpenGL driver, that wouldn't help.