Yesterday’s Back to Mac event introduced the Mac Store, essentially the OS X version of the App Store.
This and several other items signaled what many have expected for a while, i.e. that iOS was infiltrating OS X.
Many are deconstructing the terms of the Mac Store, and several, including Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner (@beltzner) and John Battelle (@johnbattelle) have expressed concern (fear, anger, annoyance?) that OS X as we know, and love, it is headed to the grave.
Also noteworthy is that Java appears to be the next Flash. Java for Mac is being depracated and could be left out of future releases, or so this announcement hints. This isn’t to say that OS X would block third-party JRE installs, he said hopefully.
But wait, there’s more. from the Mac Store guidelines:
Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g. Java, Rosetta) will be rejected.
This is kind of a big deal, if everyone is reading the tea leaves correctly. Essentially, Apple is dictating what should (and possibly can) be installed on the computers it sells you, creating a black box, sanitized experience, not just for the interwebs, but for computing generally.
And why not, since this is what most consumer electronics devices provide, i.e. a box that performs tasks using proprietary software and hardware, and if you open the case to muck around, you’ve voided your warranty.
Good for the average consumer, probably. Good for me, not really.
Does that leave us all running Linux or (gasp) going back to Windows? Will Apple try to preserve its geek appeal with a branch of OS X that stays, erm, open?
Is all this talk white noise? Find the comments.
I suspect Java for Mac is being deprecated simply because it’s not worth the trouble anymore…3rd-party JREs work fine (at least in my experience).
Nor do I think that the Mac Store will be the only means for obtaining apps for future versions of OS X (although the challenge of jailbreaking a MacBook does have some geek appeal if that happens). I mean, OS X is essentially Unix…they’re going to try to lock that down? Really?
On another note, I do think that Back to the Mac plus Netflix’s news yesterday that streaming access now exceeds CD mailings is the death knell for optical drive media.
There aren’t very many third-party JREs for Mac out there, from what I can tell. Unlike with Flash, finding a JRE to install isn’t going to be super easy.
Both iOS and OS X are based in Unix, since one is based on the other which is based on Unix 🙂 So, yeah, I’ll bet they try to lock it down, and that barrier will enough for most people.
You’re right about the optical drive. The new Air comes with a software reinstall stick, not a cee-dee. Good call on that one.
The recent revelations by Canonical suggest that they are evil, so by association Ubuntu is evil, so by association Linux is evil.
We’ve always known Apple are evil, but this suggests they are moving into App Nazi (thread killer) territory. At this rate they will have to change their corporate name to Apple Muhahaha Inc.
So Microsoft are starting to look fresh and clean in comparison. Personally, I would like to welcome our moderately less evil overlords…
Cheers
Tim…
Not familiar with the Canonical reference, what did they reveal?
Funny you mention Muhahaha, someone replied with that to a tweet about what “think different” really means.
The problem with Apple is they make great products, so great in fact, that they’ve zombiefied a ton of smart people who should know better.
Great about about less evil overlords, and hey, Win 7 doesn’t suck so . . .
RE: Cononical Evil?
I was referring to the speculation about:
1) The true motives behind their promotion of open core and copy copyright issues:
http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html
2) Claims they are not contributing enough to Linux generally. This is probably untrue and there is an argument for the value of promotion of Linux, which Ubuntu certainly does, against actual development, which could be questioned.
3) Alleged, lack of contributions/involvement in Debian.
All open to debate, but worth mentioning for the sake of scaremongering in an attempt to make Microsoft (whose products I don’t use yet) seem mildly less evil. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Windowses and most of Linuxes don’t have Java pre-installed – so why to blame Apple that they do not want to maintain preinstalled Java? (Taking into account that they do not need it for any of their products)
The only Java desktop applications that I use on my Mac are Oracle SQL Developer and IBM Lotus Notes (actually no longer because it is much slower than web client). So it would be more reasonable that Oracle and/or IBM would take over and supply easy installation of Java for desktop applications.
In addition I use Java VM as platform for JRuby – but for such needs I expect that soon somebody will make Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) formula that will compile and install latest OpenJDK version which would be even better than waiting for Apple to compile latest versions.
So I do not see a big issue with “deprecated Java” by Apple. And in nearest future I also do not see a threat that Apple will restrict manual software installation on Mac OS X – they still need to keep Mac OS X as developer platform so that developers will keep developing applications for locked iOS platform.
Got it. I did find that via Google, but wanted to make sure that’s what you meant. My experience with FOSS people is that it’s never open enough for some, which causes forks. Not a bad thing, just an observation. FOSS will always beyond a critical success point when free needs subsidy.
That’s a problem I’d like to solve, or see someone else solve.
Good points all around, and to be clear, I’m not blaming Apple for deprecating their JRE, just like I don’t blame them for leaving Flash off the base OS X install.
What I do see is a split in Macs, probably in OS 11, with the low-end laptops/desktops going iOS, and the high-end going OS 11, which will be the developer OS.
I’ll bet it will cost more, essentially adding another tax for developers. Why? Because it’s harder to build, harder to support and (Apple will guess) used by fewer people when faced with a higher cost.