If you’d like to point out the hearsay and speculation I might be able to furnish you with some links.
This thread is as good as any.
If you have an official link to Apple requesting their loaner machine back due to Blender refusing to develop for Metal I’d love to read about that. I’d love to read the agreement regarding the loaner machine because it might have been very specific to Blender working on a Metal port of Cycles, and for all intents and purposes Blender might have broken the promise and Apple might have been in its full right to request said machine back.
P.S.
“Blender have been unable to find a Metal developer, probably because no Metal developer is interested and could earn significantly more making Apps for iOS.”
That sentence is the very definition of speculation.
The thing about Blender is that all communication is open.
Straight from the horse’s mouth,
[Bf-committers] Metal GPU support (blender.org)
Blender hasn’t ‘refused’ to develop for Metal, it’s interesting that you would use such language, they don’t have the in-house expertise to support Metal. A loan of a Mac doesn’t and shouldn’t hold the Blender Devs to an unreasonable contract to slavishly sweep up the mess Apple leaves in its wake.
In the post above Ton again asks for anyone with Metal knowledge to get involved, to my knowledge there have been a couple of developers who have claimed to have started work on the Metal port but they have not got beyond the announcement phase on devtalk.
So Blender has not been able to find a Metal developer that has been able to show their worth to then perhaps give a contract to. This is a fact not speculation. I speculated that Metal developers are in short supply and they can command a significant wage so Blender would find it difficult to attract a developer. This is the problem when a company drops Open Source APIs to focus on proprietary closed APIs the talent pool is extraordinarily small.
So the decision has been made to go with Vulkan and Mac users will have to hope that MoltenVK is sufficiently performant or doesn’t leave them lacking features.
How’s Metal support in Houdini? I would be very surprised if Houdini survived the move to Apple Silicon. Even if the Mac userbase is above 1% a lot of companies will be doing a cost benefit analysis of continuing support of the Mac platform. Bringing an enormous codebase like Houdini to the Apple Silicon/Metal would be a huge undertaking that SideFX might just say nope to.
So what’s your point?