Valve drops macOS support for SteamVR
Valve has announced it's ending support for macOS for SteamVR.
SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux.
We recommend that OSX users continue to opt into the SteamVR [macos] branches for access to legacy builds.
Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties... -> Betas.
Apple announced SteamVR coming to the Mac at WWDC in 2017, so support from Valve lasted for a mere three years. This shouldn't come as a surprise though, since the macOS ecosystem simply isn't geared towards gaming and VR in any way, shape, or form.
Most Mac users have to settle for Intel integrated graphics, and even the Mac users with a dedicated video card have to settle for subpar and overpriced AMD cards, since Apple refuses to support NVIDIA. On top of that, Apple has deprecated OpenGL and wants developers to use their proprietary Metal API instead. In a world where most game developers use DirectX or OpenGL/Vulkan, that just doesn't make a lot of sense.
And let's not forget that the writing is on the wall for macOS as a general purpose operating system anyway, since Apple will most likely use the move to ARM processors in Macs to further lock down macOS, making it more like iOS.
While macOS might be more popular than Linux in absolute numbers, the cold and harsh truth is that the Linux userbase simply has a far larger group of skilled developers, programmers, and tinkerers willing to put the effort into making non-native games work on Linux and to improve support for things like VR devices. These are exactly the kind of people Apple seems to have a deep-rooted disdain for.
Expect more of these kinds of announcements over the coming years, as game companies (and other developers) have to decide whether or not to support an isolated and locked down platform like macOS on ARM - a platform without first-party OpenGL or Vulkan support, with a steward actively pushing you to use a proprietary API that you can't use anywhere else.