Is it as simple as that? As much as we can know anything about this imbroglio it seems that Apple wants to have active input into the development of the driver and NVIDIA is not prepared to accede to this. That is their right. You could say that this means that they share responsibility with Apple for the impasse. But the charge of not caring is at least equally applicable (I say more applicable) to Apple since they are providing a notionally open, expandable platform and by their own policy are blocking access to a key potential component of that expandability. I say this mindful of the fact that NVIDIA appears to have no issue getting drivers working on Windows (including WHQL versions) in addition to Linux. It appears to be Apple alone that is creating some kind of unusual barrier to entry for NVIDIA. In any case a "care factor" should be irrelevant to a dry engineering and operational issue as this. Apple customers are gaining nothing for their inability to put a couple of RTX Quadros into their Mac Pros. My view is that the onus is on Apple, as the purveyor of the platform and in light of the long history and conventions of platform expandability over decades, to make its platform as attractive as possible to 3rd party suppliers particularly of subsystems as critical as the GPU. Apple, as you say, don't have the market position to dictate terms to NVIDIA and never will. You may recall that RED Digital Cinema implored Apple (if I remember correctly they aimed their comments directly at Apple) to clear this up so they could launch real-time 8K decoding on the Mac. They were demonstrating their new decoding engine on Xeon-based PCs with NVIDIA GPUs and were pretty clear that non-NVIDIA alternatives were not viable.
