Apple drops Java and more: so what?

The big news of the past week is that Apple deprecated Java, so we won't be probably seeing any Apple-made JDK in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, coming next summer. But there have been other news, that is a Store for Mac OS X applications coming, similar to the one for iPhone and iPad. While Steve Jobs explicitly said that it's not "the" store, but "just another" store, that is it will be possible to manually install applications to Mac OS X as usual, the new thing carries the same absurd limitations typical of the iPhone store, so that any typical application from a competitor, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom will be forbidden; and Java applications are forbidden as well. Personally I think Steve Job is as reliable as a crooked politician - do you remember him proclaiming "Apple is committed in making Mac OS X the best operating system to run Java"? - so I don't particularly trust his intentions with the new store. The direction that Apple is pursuing is clear: move from computers to luxury appliances (yes, in USA the penetration of Mac computers has grown to 20%, but they're making only 33% of profits out of them, the remainder being iStuff) and grab as much as control as they can. I think it's not paranoid to suspect that they'll try to bring their current Mac customers to a walled garden model, where Apple controls what you can install, and maybe we will have "the Store" in Mac OS 10.8. After all,...

Date: October, 24 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/10/24/apple-drops-java-and-more-so-what

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