I'm not aware of any good writeups. Neither Apple nor Nvidia wanted to publicize it. Here's the story as I know it:
When Apple decided to make their own GPU, all the other GPU vendors sued them for patent infringement. Apple countersued, and the litigation went on for many, many years. In the case of Nvidia there were also previous legal disputes over liability for Macbook GPU hardware defects, which meant that Apple had cut all ties with Nvidia years prior. This probably led to Apple's legal fight with Nvidia being especially prolonged and vicious.
Khronos Group, which produces the OpenGL and Vulkan standards, has ties to Nvidia. I don't know all the details but it seems Apple's lawyers decided that they would block implementation of any new Khronos standards in Apple products due to the Nvidia connection. As a result the OpenGL implementation in macOS was frozen at version 4.1 (July 2010) for many years, even prior to deprecation, lacking important features like compute shaders. Of course Vulkan support for macOS was completely out of the question. They also stopped work on Safari's implementation of WebGL 2 (which was left in a half-done state for years until it was eventually pushed to completion by Google engineers including myself). Additionally, Apple successfully maneuvered the WebGPU working group out of Khronos to W3C, and vetoed SPIR-V on the web, eventually resulting in WGSL.
So the legal dispute between Apple and Nvidia had a big influence on the industry. If Apple hadn't been allergic to Khronos standards, in an optimistic scenario we might have had a significantly better Vulkan standard with contributions from Apple's Metal team, Vulkan+SPIR-V support on macOS and iOS, and even SPIR-V on the web, which would have given us a truly cross-platform modern graphics API to replace OpenGL and made writing portable graphics software significantly easier in the last decade.
Of course today all this seems a lot less relevant with the rise of coding agents that can port a codebase or even a binary executable between platforms with a few prompts. So it will soon be a forgotten historical curiosity.
When Apple decided to make their own GPU, all the other GPU vendors sued them for patent infringement. Apple countersued, and the litigation went on for many, many years. In the case of Nvidia there were also previous legal disputes over liability for Macbook GPU hardware defects, which meant that Apple had cut all ties with Nvidia years prior. This probably led to Apple's legal fight with Nvidia being especially prolonged and vicious.
Khronos Group, which produces the OpenGL and Vulkan standards, has ties to Nvidia. I don't know all the details but it seems Apple's lawyers decided that they would block implementation of any new Khronos standards in Apple products due to the Nvidia connection. As a result the OpenGL implementation in macOS was frozen at version 4.1 (July 2010) for many years, even prior to deprecation, lacking important features like compute shaders. Of course Vulkan support for macOS was completely out of the question. They also stopped work on Safari's implementation of WebGL 2 (which was left in a half-done state for years until it was eventually pushed to completion by Google engineers including myself). Additionally, Apple successfully maneuvered the WebGPU working group out of Khronos to W3C, and vetoed SPIR-V on the web, eventually resulting in WGSL.
So the legal dispute between Apple and Nvidia had a big influence on the industry. If Apple hadn't been allergic to Khronos standards, in an optimistic scenario we might have had a significantly better Vulkan standard with contributions from Apple's Metal team, Vulkan+SPIR-V support on macOS and iOS, and even SPIR-V on the web, which would have given us a truly cross-platform modern graphics API to replace OpenGL and made writing portable graphics software significantly easier in the last decade.
Of course today all this seems a lot less relevant with the rise of coding agents that can port a codebase or even a binary executable between platforms with a few prompts. So it will soon be a forgotten historical curiosity.