I'm less mad about Metal existing, and more mad about Apple deprecating/abandoning OpenGL. There was no good reason for that, especially for a company with their resources.
[EDIT: Actually, they do, with the OpenGL compatibility pack at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/opencl-and-opengl-compatib.... It's new for Windows 10, and it only supports up to OpenGL 3.3, suspiciously around the same compatibility level as macOS...]
MacOS, well, Apple got into a huge spat with NVIDIA in ~2012. Around the same time, actually, that Apple stopped updating OpenGL (though they wouldn't formally deprecate OpenGL until 2018). Part of me wonders if NVIDIA was writing the OpenGL for Apple, but then OpenGL just got put on the shelf after the spat.
The result though is that neither Windows, nor Apple, supports OpenCL past 1.2 or OpenGL past 3.2/3.3. It's the GPU vendors that have been taking us further.
[EDIT 2: Correction, macOS supports OpenGL 4.1, Windows tops out at 3.3 without GPU drivers if you have DirectX 12]
> OpenGL compatibility pack
This is using the Mesa Gallium state tracker with a DirectX backend. It's not meant for vendors with a native OpenGL driver.
Apple didn't allow AMD though to continue updating OpenGL in their MacOS drivers, possibly because (I'm just speculating) they decided to invent Metal to replace OpenGL around the same time as their NVIDIA spat when they stopped updating OpenGL. Metal came out in 2014, the NVIDIA spat + OpenGL abandonment was 2012. Just my suspicion that MacOS's OpenGL is NVIDIA-based.
I don't think Nvidia had anything to do with that.
This means that around 2012, Apple would have been most likely working on OpenGL 4.2 (possibly with NVIDIA, and maybe even with NVIDIA's source code) but that's the year their relationship soured. However, depending on the source you read, there are reports their relationship was souring as early as 2009.
It's been many years, but even on Tiger I seem to remember it shipped with an old OpenGL version. I can't find the actual version anywhere though.
Here's a post on Google Groups from 2006 stating that Tiger didn't have full support of 2.0:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics.api.opengl/c/AXFx1...
OpenGl 2.0 was released in 2004.
I agree with your sentiment. I like OpenGL quite a bit due to its ubiquity. From my perspective as a casual graphics dev, it's relatively easy to use OpenGL to get triangles on the screen, compared to Vulkan (although I know Vulkan has other benefits).
> And what about all the thousands of programs that uses OpenGL?
Judging on past behavior - Apple isn't shy about breaking compatibility with techs they're no longer interested in.
I believe it to be true, based on my own checking, but I'd love to have a link to point people to as this has come up a few times.
Just seems a bit odd to me they'd only do this on one architecture.
This is why I mostly refuse to buy games for my Apple hardware. Until Apple makes some serious commitments (and shows evidence of following through with them), I will not view my MacBook as a viable gaming device. Right now, I'm not even convinced Rosetta 2 will last more than 6 or 7 years.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ilUE_r5WNGlRhfGx71XH...
And of course there were games too, e.g. NOVA which stopped working several versions ago - and isn't available anywhere else (PC or whatever) either, so basically there isn't a way to play it at all nowadays (it may not be a great game and basically was a Halo ripoff for early iPhones, but i do not see quality as a reason for it to disappear - besides, it might have been one of someone's first games, people like to have those around).