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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that there is some sort of Oracle licensing agreement that prevents Apple from distributing Java with the release. You'd think that these two massive public companies would be able to work something out

This is pure unfounded speculation.

In reality Apple probably wanted to make the Lion base install leaner.

Many components are are now simply loaded and installed on demand. Like for example also extra voices for text2speech.

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Mike Swingler (Apple JVM developer) said: http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00041.h...

After a decade of shipping Java on the Mac and tricking old apps that hardcode paths to the 1.3.1 JVM, or putting in class loader hacks to fake out Xerces XML classes that were moved in 1.5.0, we are ready to try something different.

In http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00044.h...

What you loose in a per-app embedded model is shared memory mapping of the native libraries and .jar files, but this is the same problem as a half dozen apps embedding (often different) versions of the Sparkle.framework to do app self-updates. The cost of the JVM heap is still the same, and class-sharing was never ported to 64-bit by Sun, so that optimization hasn't been around for a long time on Macs.

In http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00038.h...

Long-term, we recommend that app developers who use the JavaApplicationStub should transition to embedding the Java runtime within their own app. We are working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project to provide an open source version of JDK7 that can be embedded, and several developers have already started deploying their apps with an embedded JDK7 (but it requires many manual steps right now).

We are tracking the progress of creating an embeddable JRE in http://java.net/jira/browse/MACOSX_PORT-105

Conclusion: Apple's JVM team think this model is better for solving end users problem with JVM compatibility.

The suggested "bring your own" model of software deployment solves a lot of support problems, too.

Yes, but "bring your own" solves a lot of Apple's support problems related to sole exclusivity on old and insecure JVMs.

And conveniently it means that mac app store apps can't be java apps, which leads to them being better integrated and (slightly) higher quality.

There are already apps on the Mac App Store embedding their own JRE.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyberduck/id409222199?mt=12&#...

Can't they just distribute the JRE like Apple suggested?

Does this mean all Java software that's distributed in this new way has to be compatible with OpenDK's license?

I like how you put those 2 sentences together:

> This is pure unfounded speculation.

> In reality Apple probably wanted to make the Lion base install leaner.

Can't agree more - pure speculation.

Apple's "leaner install base" for Lion seems to ship with Oracle's VisualVM tool, which won't work until you install Java

The thing that annoys me is that people always thing the worst when something happens in Apple land. Most of the times things happen because they simply make sense.

That's absolutely right. The problem is just that not everything that makes sense for Apple's bottom line makes sense for mine.

For instance, deleting everything from my iPod without warning probably made sense for Apple's copyright negatiations with media companies. It didn't make much sense to me. Censoring dictonaries and banning everything sexual, satirical, political or otherwise "unclean" from the app store probably makes sense for Apple. Makes no sense to me.

So, I guess, the issue I have with the phrase "making sense" is that it obfiuscates the fact that everyone has their own vested interests and the vested interests of a particular large corporation are sometimes very different from mine.

"the vested interests of a particular large corporation are sometimes very different from mine."

Couldn't agree more! Especially when it comes to large corporations where you are a product being sold to advertisers, they're even worse than large corporations that accept money from you in return for goods and services.

I wouldn't say one is necessarily worse than the other. It's more that my interests overlap and disagree with either of them in different areas.

Ad driven companies have an incentive to spy on me and I have to defend against that. On the other hand, they have to be pretty agnostic when it comes to the type of content they enable and that gives me free and anonymous access to pretty much anything I want.

Stuff like this needs to be called out. These days, some blogger speculates on a reason for something and every technology news site is reporting it as fact.

Agreed. This was announced 8 months ago and widely covered by the tech media. It's just irresponsible reporting if people are covering this story and don't know the reasons why.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/21/apple_threatens_to_k...

It's also a known fact that the CEOs of these two companies are very close friends; it's unthinkable that they couldn't sort out an issue like that.

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They certainly do – probably not for Apple but certainly for consumers. Apple currently only distributes Lion digitally. You can get it on a thumb drive in two months or so but it will cost you more than twice as much as the download. Apple wants consumers to download Lion.

3.7 GB (that’s the size of the download) are still a lot and keeping the size of downloads as small as possible is certainly a valid goal.

I think Apple shaved off about one GB or so compared to what they pressed on DVDs and that’s certainly noticeable for many people. My parents’ house (in Germany) has this really awful DSL connection, more than 4,000 kbit/s are just not possible. Having to download 1 GB less would save them over thirty minutes. (Downloading merely 3.7 GB would take them over two hours.)

Making stuff only few people use optional is still a great idea when you want people to download it. Not everyone has FIOS.

IIRC The 3.7 Lion install is down from the 4.7 Snow Leopard install, which was the result of a crash diet that Leopard was put on, I believe, bringing it down from around 7GB originally.

Apple's been squeezing out the bloat for several years, I believe, with the intention of doing digital downloads of OS in the future.

This implies the Mac App Store has been in the planning stages since around 2007-2008 or so (when Snow Leopard development likely started.)

If I remember correctly, in Tiger the default install included a few gigabytes of printer drivers that were removed and downloaded on demand in later versions. The OS itself has remained fairly constant in size.

Heh, 4M is considered a "really awful" internet connection these days? I have 6M and am perfectly happy.

Then again, an apt-get upgrade once a week is a lot more efficient than a 4G monolith every year :)

My parents’ problem is more that those 4M are the limit for the house, their DSL line just isn’t any faster. The connection also seems somewhat flaky (this might be an illusion, though). My parents must be really far away from the next DSLAM, close to the limit of what’s possible.

It’s certainly noticeable, there are really annoying slowdowns when someone watches a YouTube video and someone else tries to browse the web. The problem is probably that in my parents’ house the internet connection is often used by more than one person. When I’m downloading something I can sort of deal with a video that takes longer to load, but when someone else causes my video to take longer to load, well that’s annoying.

Maybe they should switch to cable.

If we are talking about 4Mb/s, then yes, that's at least half of the slowest speeds you'd expect nowadays. The cheapest package my ISP offers is 10Mb/s, with the average priced one being 30Mb/s.

But that's cable, right? DSL is different; 15Mbps seems to be the high end of DSL connectivity. But, unlike with cable, you are not sharing that bandwidth with everyone else on your block: it's all yours. Hence, it's advantageous on occasion.

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.

>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.

It matters on the 64 GB Air. Between compression and removing components, OS X has gotten a lot smaller.

Bandwidth is not the only consideration. Apple sells MacBook air's with a single 64GB 'disk'. On such a system, users will notice a difference if you manage to save 'a couple hundred megs' a few times.

Quick note: they do not sell 64Gb MBAs anymore. I don't think they have since last year.

Even if that were true, the price of Apple's early adoption is that they have to support it for four years. (Just like they supported 32-bit x86 for years even though they only used it for a short time.)

Uh, yes they do. The options are 64/128 for the 11", and 128/256 for the 13".

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