It kept a lot of commercial software off the Windows platform and left it on Workstations like SGI and DEC had. The movie houses that were rendering movies were using OpenGL on their renderfarms and its lack of availability on Windows kept windows off those desktops.

The key being that if you've got a technology that works on both server farms for production and workstations for development, you support that so that your OS is a viable candidate for the developer workstation. I don't see a Metal port coming to Linux in any reasonable way any time soon, and I don't see researchers giving up OpenCL or even OpenGL any time soon, so it just means that Apple is going to forego that business.

With the recent github purchase it gives the oddly dissonant experience of having Microsoft being the 'developer friendly' OS company and the MacOS being the 'developer hostile' OS company. Where, and this is important, support for cross platform tools determines hostility or support. I would not argue that Apple is not the best development environment for the Apple platform, or Windows for the Windows platform.

OpenGL is a real-time graphics API, not an offline render system used by renderfarms. I have never heard of movies or special effects rendered in OpenGL. The first major renderer was Renderman, the only game in town for years, and it has nothing to do with OpenGL.

You are correct. However, many in-studio tools are written in OpenGL. These tools are used to model objects and layout lighting, scenes, etc. by artists. They are written in OpenGL, usually on Linux. (Source: I work with several people who formerly built these tools for well-known studios like DreamWorks and Sony.)

Of course, but that’s not what we are discussing. The context for my comment was regarding offline rendering and render farms.

That's like saying roads are THE travel surface for cars.

... yes?