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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think it matters -- some extra megs here, some extra bandwidth there, some ugliness that few people notice -- and pretty soon you end up with Adobe Acrobat.

There's a reason people felt in love with everything Apple does: they took attention to details at heights nobody in this industry did.

But I also think a couple hundred megs of data is not the only reason -- but more to do with wanting to cut dependencies to other companies (Apple does that frequently). Once upon a time Java was one of the preferred methods for writing Mac OS apps: Apple clearly doesn't want that anymore.

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>Once upon a time Java was one of the preferred methods for writing Mac OS apps: Apple clearly doesn't want that anymore.

Apple just doesn't see enough benefit in continuing their own JVM development. The primary reason that Java was the preferred method was purely because of the portable nature of Java code, and the fact that Mac OS9 and OSX didn't really have enough marketshare to make full ports feasible. Since OSX has a fairly decent marketshare at this point, it's an easier argument to make a native port over multiplatform, portable code like Java.

One of the issues with Java on OSX was that, most of the time, you couldn't actually code to the latest version of Java, because Apple was months(or even years) behind on implementing new JVM and Java language specs.

It took Apple about a year and a half to update their JVM to 1.6 after that was released. Here's a timeline for Apple's historical Java releases:

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/28/os-x-java-defini...

Java 6 support was released in May, 2008: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1856

Given that history, and the fact that iOS is primarily objective C, it's really no surprise that Apple decided to depreciate the JVM from their OS.

So then why not remove ruby and distribute that separately? How about the multi-gig translation language packs that I'll never use?

I think Apple should seriously consider looking into removing other obscure things as well. Their process of downloading optional stuff is very slick and painless.

After launching Minecraft (which needs Java) I had to confirm one dialog box. Java downloaded, installed and Minecraft launched. No user interaction required, it was completely painless.

I’m not sure why you are so hung up on Java. It’s certainly obscure enough to make it optional. Languages could certainly also be removed but OS X always had this philosophy of shipping every app and every OS with every language. There are no language versions of apps and Apple doesn’t like them.

You may not use them, but not everyone speaks english. Plus, I suspect that those were one of the things that got removed and that get pulled down at install time if needed.

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