The idea is that leaving behind old APIs will benefit driver and system stability for the entire ecosystem, benefiting your users in other ways. You might disagree with that view, but Apple is not doing this out of spite alone.
I'm not sure that switching to use a library like MoltenGL for this stuff would take months either, but you're in a better position to judge that I guess.
For example in one of the email responses someone from Apple says that Carbon was a temporary solution but quite frankly that was never clear from the outside world. It seems there were even plans to make Carbon 64 bits that were scratched at the last minute.
Same with the hardware. One day out of the blue Apple announced its new laptops without USB-A ports. Even 3 years later USB-A is still one of the most used peripheral ports in the PC world (including Mac and Windows). Even Apple does not ship peripherals with USB-C cables other than adapters. AFAIK its mice and keyboards still ship with USB-A cables for charging.
These tactics are maybe ok for the consumer world but not for professionals who need reliability above all else.
USB-A still works, you just need a compatibility layer (a dongle).
OpenGL has been deprecated for years. Why are people reacting like this is a new development.
Not even that, a cable will do. I have zero dongles, and just bought a few tens of $ USB-C to X cables...
Assuming you work at a company willing to spend the money on official Apple dongles and not cheap flakey clones.
Unfortunately few companies will do that and now all Apple I/O goes through cheap unreliable dongles.
The reason Apple is doing this in this poor way is that they seem to want to push Metal as the answer. They want incentives for developers to move to Metal by making their lives more difficult on OpenGL, because even with libraries those libraries must be maintained and included. They don't want to bear responsibility for this legacy. I'm explaining, not defending.
This is the direct opposite to the Linux ecosystem, where Gallium3D not only facilitates both OpenGL and Vulkan, but has had attempted Direct3D implementations in the past. Yet another case where Linux has the "everything and the kitchen sink approach", and Apple just flat out dictates a single choice to everybody. That attitude sometimes helps Apple, but sometimes it doesn't.
Even among Mesa drivers, usage of Gallium 3D is not mandatory. If the driver team thinks it will make their job easier, they can use it. If they think it won't, they won't. Intel 965 driver (the current driver for Intel GPUs) doesn't use Gallium, for example. The new one ("Iris"), currently in the works, will. For a long time, the only driver that used Gallium 3D was only the AMD one.
Because as a user I don't want apps forcing extra baggage like old APIs to be supported forever in the OS. Nor I want apps that are fossilized and don't take advantage of new platform features.
If I didn't care for apps being Mac-specific and taking advantage of what the platform has to offer and moving on with the platform, I'd just as well use Windows or Linux (and vice versa).
I think it is pretty unreasonable to require developers to rewrite their programs periodically just because there is a some new feature in some new API.
Also, software that gets updated just for the sake of it usually ends up worse than before.
I can’t verify this claim, but given my personal experience it makes perfect sense. I run a 980 Ti alongside a 950 in my hackintosh tower and graphical glitches on the desktop happen pretty regularly despite both cards being perfectly healthy.
The other thing is that historically, Apple has been unwilling to differentiate the drivers between consumer and workstation cards because generally speaking that concept is kind of silly. Everybody should have workstation-class stability, not just those who shell out 3-5x more cash for a workstation card. It’s obvious why Nvidia would take issue with this,
The Nvidia web drivers are not great but there are so many factors that could be producing those glitches.
I've built about a dozen hackintoshes since 2010 and while I've experienced many problems I personally haver never seen graphical glitches.
I don't think it's fair to expect the same level of reliability from a frankenstein you've built yourself than a commercial product.
I think in my case specifically the graphical glitches are caused by having dual GPUs. That’s a somewhat uncommon configuration, but not so strange as to not test for.
Then Apple needs to dig down into their pocket, maybe they’ve got some extra money there, and solve this problem.