I'm typing this on a MacBook with an Nvida GPU that was created in 2012, many years after the failing laptop GPU debacle. AFAIK, Apple used that GPU until 2015?
I'd wager that Apple has been using AMD for something as mundane as offering better pricing, rather than disagreement 12 years ago. (Again: despite all the lawsuits, Apple is still a major Samsung customer.)
This used to be true, as Apple swapped between AMD and Nvidia chips several times in 2000-2015. Then Nvidia and Apple fell out, and Apple has not used Nvidia chips in new designs in 5 years - a timeframe in which Nvidia coincidentally achieved its largest technical advantages over AMD. Apple goes as far as to actively prevent Nvidia's own macOS eGPU driver from working on modern macOS. A simple pricing dispute does not appear to be a good explanation here.
CUDA is such an "external dependency". It locks you in to something that's not an Apple product.
It is the same issue that caused the Xbox 360 red-ring-of-death, and caused "baking your graphics card" to become a thing (including AMD cards). It basically affected everyone in the industry at the time, and Apple would not have gotten any different outcome from AMD had they been in the hotseat at the time. They were just throwing a tantrum because they're apple damn it and they can't have failures! Must be the supplier's fault.
That one has always struck me as a "bridezilla" story where Apple thinks they're big enough to push their problems onto their suppliers and NVIDIA said no.
And as far as the Xbox thing... Microsoft was demanding a discount and NVIDIA is free to say no. If they wanted a price break partway through the generation, it probably should have been negotiated in the purchase agreements in the first place. NVIDIA needs to turn a profit too and likely structured their financial expectations of the deal in a particular way based on the deal that was signed.
Those are always the go-to "OMG NVIDIA so terrible!" stories and neither of them really strike me as something where NVIDIA did anything particularly wrong.
Canonical, which ships nvidia's proprietary driver with Ubuntu, is another quite major OS vendor that collaborates with nvidia successfully. Recently, Ubuntu's wayland-based desktop environment was also the first to work with nvidia's driver (the results of this work are open source).
EDIT - for added detail:
> - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards
Most (all?) of which bend to Nvidia's demands because Nvidia's been extremely successful in getting end users to want their chips, making the Nvidia chip a selling point.
> - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology
IBM bends to Nvidia's demands so POWER can remain a relevant HPC platform.
> - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully
Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully. It's true - but for the longest time Nvidia would have been out of business if they didn't. I will concede this point, but I don't find this is enough to paint a different picture.
> - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it
Mellanox bent over to Nvidia's demands to such an extent that they were acquired.
> - nvidia collaborates with ARM today...
Collaboration in what sense? My impression is that Nvidia and ARM have a plain passive customer/supplier relationship today.
> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...
Nvidia is humongously behind their competitors Intel and AMD in open source contribution while having a large amount more R&D in graphics. They are terrible at open source compared to the "industry standard" of their market, and only partake as far as it serves their short term needs.
They are perfectly entitled to behave this way, by the way. But Nvidia's open source track record is only more evidence is that they don't understand how to work in an open ecosystem, not less.
> You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).
The "whataboutism" is valid but completely irrelevant here. I would also not appreciate Apple buying ARM.
> For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.
Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM, Motorola, Samsung (SoCs) and PowerVR for technology strategy reasons, not relationship reasons. Apple had no reason to part ways with Nvidia for technical reasons (especially considering they went to AMD instead), but did so because of the terrible relationship they built.