I didn't say they did. My claim is that Apple deprecating OpenCL is a straightforward and uninteresting thing; it's a company that has no influence on GPU computing getting out of the business of a technology that also has no influence on GPU computing.

I work in data science too, and who cares about laptops. Desktop computers with GPUs, SSDs, and a lot of RAM are what you need. You can thoroughly bling out the hardware and the entire computer will still cost less than your monthly AWS bill to access a GPU. (This is all getting pretty irrelevant to Apple, though, who doesn't make such computers.)