Today AV1 can be supported in hardware and is supported in all recent or upcoming SOCs and GPUs. So Apple have no excuse not to do it when they are even pouring tons of money into making and refreshing their own chips.
Can you explain how a new or soon to be released device having hardware support for something adds hardware support to the last 9 years of devices apple has sold that still work with iMessage and Apple's Photos app? Or should Apple just break those because you have a personal bias against a standardized file format?
I guess Google and Android have demonstrated that supporting hardware after you've sold it isn't something that people actually care about so maybe you're right and apple should take the same approach - after all I'm sure breaking older hardware will result in sales, which is good for business.
Above was never about older devices. They can use H.264 and VP9 which have hardware support for years already. It was about newer ones. There isn't a need to ever use the toxic H.265.
All Apple devices communicate with each other via heic, etc. older devices may not be able to encode the video version, but they can all decode it.
You are saying that Apple should revert all of their image and video encoding to h264 because you’ve decided av1, etc is better, and that justifies regressing 100s of millions if not billions of devices.
I do not understand why you find this concept so hard to grasp - millions or billions of devices exist, are in use, and produce and display heic and heif data. Those devices will continue to do so, because new hardware that supports new codecs can’t be magically installed in those devices. So if nothing else, devices that produce the standardized format you despise will continue to produce that format, hence it makes sense for chrome to support that format.
new devices can encode in av1 and similar, but only if you think it’s reasonable for Apple to effectively break older devices for no real reason. Given people already accuse Apple of designed obsolescence, despite providing greater long term support for all its devices than any other company, I can’t imagine “Apple breaks sending images to old ‘supported’ devices” going over well.
Again, this is a super basic and obvious concept that should not be remotely challenging to understand.
I get that you hate heif and hevc, and I get that new hardware supports codecs that might be better, but that is not remotely relevant because there are vast numbers of devices out there that don’t support your favorite codec of the day.
Apple are at fault for deliberately proliferating the damaging codec. Trying to whitewash it with arguments like "they can't do otherwise" won't going to fly. They aren't some poor vendor with no choice. What they are causing is reducing choice for everyone else due to their own size, which was exactly the point.
