When did Apple ever have influence in the field of GPU computing.

And I work in data science and nobody is using their own laptops when you have AWS.

I didn't say they did. My claim is that Apple deprecating OpenCL is a straightforward and uninteresting thing; it's a company that has no influence on GPU computing getting out of the business of a technology that also has no influence on GPU computing.

I work in data science too, and who cares about laptops. Desktop computers with GPUs, SSDs, and a lot of RAM are what you need. You can thoroughly bling out the hardware and the entire computer will still cost less than your monthly AWS bill to access a GPU. (This is all getting pretty irrelevant to Apple, though, who doesn't make such computers.)

Whatever criticisms can justifiably be levelled against nvidia, having a bad software stack isn't one of them.

Most of the field of machine learning is irreproducible right now because you can't not use CUDA, but you can't promise that it will work the same on anyone else's computer, or that it will work six months from now.