they're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
I think they are saying the fair comparison should be what another 1st party GPU maker supports in their 1st party drivers, not whether or not Windows provides 1st party Vulkan implementation for 3rd party hardware.
Microsoft has the OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan compatibility pack. Major issue is that it's just Mesa compiled to a D3D12 GPU backend, so if you have anything but Snapdragon it's basically useless.
I don't think Valve funded Proton and Linux development by accident.
Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.
How is that "fair"?
they're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
I think they are saying the fair comparison should be what another 1st party GPU maker supports in their 1st party drivers, not whether or not Windows provides 1st party Vulkan implementation for 3rd party hardware.
Microsoft has the OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan compatibility pack. Major issue is that it's just Mesa compiled to a D3D12 GPU backend, so if you have anything but Snapdragon it's basically useless.