Well, that's a two-pronged issue: one is that it is a patent minefield unlike ever before seen, the other is that it is incredibly slow in software at any quali

Well, that's a two-pronged issue: one is that it is a patent minefield unlike ever before seen, the other is that it is incredibly slow in software at any quality level. Also, it is legally terrifying to build anything on HEVC, I'm frankly surprised Apple is even trying. The basic license fees are easily ten times as much for HEVC as they were for H.264, and there are known applicable patents which aren't even in the pools (both pools! there are two!). There are also potentially license fees that apply to individual performances/transfers of content, so if you're Netflix or something you'll end up paying for every unit of content shipped. For the lot of these reasons, the Alliance for Open Media (including the Daala team (Xiph and Mozilla), The Thor team (Cisco), Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Mediatek, Netflix, Google, and a good couple dozen other major players) has formed and will probably be freezing a standard bitstream format this year on a format that outperforms HEVC for a given bitrate, a given CPU time target, and on energy consumption (and implementation complexity) in hardware.