Apple has been somewhat GPU agnostic in the past, moving between AMD and NVIDIA with different generations. There are now reports that Apple has chosen Polaris 11 for their upcoming refreshed systems that should be announced at WWDC later this month.
Apple is going for Polaris 11, and this could help drive industry adoption
Fudzilla seems to have confirmed with some industry sources that are close to the information, and reliable, that Apple has indeed chosen AMD once again for this generation, likely for the higher efficiency and higher availability of parts. Polaris 11 is a thin and quite efficient part, given that the TDP is likely to be under 50W with enough compute power to be viable for Apple. They’re also one of the largest supporters of OpenCL, so would make sense to support the GPU that is able to implement and run OpenCL code more efficiently, if only slightly. The smaller GPU could lead the way to dedicated graphics in their smaller designs as well.
Apple’s choice of a GPU might not seem as if it matters for the greater industry, however their adoption of a tech tends to have a ripple-effect in certain industries that do indeed use OS X and Apple products, which means more efficient OpenCL code for rendering and other workloads that’ll eventually make their way to Windows and *nix applications. This trickle-down effect on developing software can have an effect on what people buy across all sectors in all markets. They have a huge presences despite what naysayers and those that dislike them might say. The first Polaris 11-based laptops might just be from Apple at WWDC later this month.