I really don't know what you're trying to argue. We're talking about web video here. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding VP9 support. VP9 outperforms H.264 and the other major browsers have added support for it.

Apple will be adding support for AV1. Like VP9, AV1 is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media has been so effective (even before AV1's release) and HEVC's licensing has been so terrible that MPEG is starting to question whether it can survive as an organization:

http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...

Royalty-free video formats are simply a better way to go.

I suspect what’s going on is that they’ve already invested software and hardware time in HEVC and instead of making a corresponding investment in a codec with similar performance they’re focusing that effort on the next generation with better performance. I suspect that if the full story of VP9 performance & HEVC licensing had been known at the time they’d have made a different call; HEVC got a lot more expensive late in the game when a lot of early plans had been set into motion.

Apple went with H264 for the original iPhone in 2007.

WebM was released in 2010. VP9 is from ‘12/‘13.

H264 was already the web video standard when WebM/VP9 came along.

I take issue with Google trying to force everyone over to their format and removing support for higher resolution H264. They crippled what used to work for me to push their agenda. And because it’s license free I’m supposed to be good with it.

This is exactly the kind of stuff people used to get pissed at MS or Apple for.

But it’s Google, and people love Chrome. So this is good and Apple is the one not going with the ‘standard’ that ‘everyone else’ is using.

Minor correction: they started with VP8 and a PR campaign trying to spin it as better than H.264 but it took VP9 to actually deliver better results than H.264. Both VP9 and H.265 offer big improvements but with a corresponding jump in processor requirements.

And, yes, it was not Google's finest hour, especially when they strung Mozilla promising to disable H.264 in Chrome but never actually shipping it (remember https://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-we...).