I was thinking about updating my Macbook Pro in a few months. Now I have to wait to see if Oracle is going to take up the slack on maintaining a JVM for Mac OS X, and whether Apple will let them.
Add that to the announcement of a Mac App Store, and I get to wait till post-Lion in 2011 to see if Apple is thinking about turning their laptops into iPads with keyboards.
I know I’m not a typical consumer, but if I end up having to run a VM to use things as basic as Eclipse and SQL Developer, why do OS X at all? I like Apple’s build quality and the digital ergonomics only they seem to get right, but paying a premium to surf the Web in nice surroundings won’t cut it.
Hopefully we’ll hear more about Java and Apple’s commitment to producing user-modifiable computers in the near future.
Update: I should point out that my primary problem with this move isn’t that Apple should continue maintaining their own version of the JDK. That seems like a waste of time for them. However, if you’re going to stop supporting it, perhaps we should get some other information, like “Hey, Oracle’s going to take care of it!” Dropping it in the release notes just brings up memories of other changes Apple PR has tripped over in the past. (No third-party languages on iOS, anyone?)
Update 2: James Gosling and a Steve Jobs quote. Before reading the comments, I had completely forgotten that no JVM means no JVM-based languages. Haven’t gotten into those yet.