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As someone who likes developing OpenGL apps in his spare time, that handwaving actually bothered me. Of course Apple's going to pick Metal's shader language, they don't fully support anything else! They're still on OpenGL 4.1 in their drivers, even though those GPUs support GL 4.5, in what seems to be an effort to move graphics devs to supporting Metal. I have no idea why anyone would let them near an open graphics spec discussion after such a stunt.

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Just like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

Apple had their own 3D API in the old days, Quickdraw 3D.

They only played nice with OpenGL, because of NeXT acquisition, NeXTSTEP had Renderman and OpenGL, and they needed to bring developers into their eco-system to avoid closing doors.

Now the bank is full and with graphics middleware, a 3D API is just another interface implementation for the scene graph rendering calls, that are actually used.

Metal is already supported by the majority of engines that matter in the industry, with Qt in the process of adopting configurable backends as well.

well that's precisely why the discussion is open – Apple can come in with their (arguably selfish) ideas, but they can't impose them on other big players such as MS, Google and Mozilla. In an ideal world this prevents the final common API from only working for one of them.

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