Steve Jobs is right, all Java developers are wrong
So, no Java 1.6 on my 32bit PPC machine. Totally pisses me off. But I understand why. The simple fact is that iPods and iPhones make more money for Apple than whiny Java developers. Oh la di da, we bought a laptop from Apple. That totally makes it worthwhile for Apple to drop billion dollar projects like the iPhone and focus on men with beards who only run Linux on their servers because of “freedom and stuff”.
Java developers are a million plus group of people and yet are probably completely irrelevant to Apple. They crunched the numbers and we got beat by 14 year old girls who like pink ponies and who thinks John Mayer is totally dreamy. This is all marked economics. How many Java developers run OS X server ? Oh, wait, you're talking about the desktop API ? Swing ? The API that Sun ignored for five years ? Now it's all about cowbell and stuff they tell me.
Maybe I sound like a douche here, but Apple simply made a business decision and us Java guys got cut from the budget. Start deploying on Apple hardware and maybe Apple would listen. Java 1.6u10 is not Java 1.6u10. It's “Java on the Desktop 1.0”. This is why people are bitching. The Sun promise from 1998 is finally here and Apple stopped caring a long time ago.
Blame Sun, not Apple. If you think this is all bullshit, start reading stock tickers. Both Sun and Apple got a ton of cash. But Apple got the balls to move in a new direction. Sun buys MySQL (with $50m annual revenue) for (evil pinky) one billion dollars. Now THAT is radical. Now Sun has two open source databases under partial semi-permanent control.
Sun focuses on the server and Apple focuses on the desktop. Sun could have spent - one billion dollars - on the Java 1.6u10 for OS X, but instead they bought MySQL. Why ? Because Sun wants to sell more servers. Apple wants to sell laptops, portable music players and cellphones.
Comments
Apple doesn't look back. From all the reports, they're moving EVERYTHING to be 64-bit. My humble guess is that Snow Leopard will only be 64-bit. Since they won't have their Java 6 port done until about the time that Snow Leopard ships, there's not much point (from their perspective) in putting Java 6 in 32 bits.
Posted by: John | October 28, 2008 10:13 PM
"Blame Sun, not Apple" wtf?
The apple JDK team is why 1.6 is not out, Sun offered to develop it for them, they declined.
Posted by: Anonymous | February 12, 2009 05:15 PM
Sun went all "OMG! Web Services!" and pimped that instead of fixing Swing bugs. Because of this and the fall of Netscape, the Java Applet went from "wow" to "crap" in five years.
I blame Sun 100% for Apple not supporting Java in a better way. Apple simply got tired of waiting and started working on the iPhone instead. Sun is a crybaby and Java 1.5 is the "Java Web Service Hype And Buy Our Servers Please Edition".
The reason Swing is ugly by default is an attempt to make the Sun Ray system cheaper to operate.
Posted by: Jan Erik Paulsen | February 12, 2009 06:35 PM
And another thing.
The OpenJDK is available for anyone to download. So where is the 32/64bit PowerPC port ? If this is so simple and easy, then why has no open source developer done it already ? Well, because Hotspot is optimized with assembly language and multiple code paths. Code that was written by Apple and possibly (drum roll) IBM developers.
This is like junior highschool all over again.
Posted by: Jan Erik Paulsen | February 13, 2009 06:04 PM