| That may have been true back in ... oh ... 2003. At that time if you read articles about people going to Java conferences(1), they kept remarking about how many people were using Powerbooks. Apple also had this really small Powerbook ... 11 inches? Anyway, Apple also had the most modern Java installed by default. Linux was still involved in a persisting match with Sun about whose freedom was the freest (probably just Stallman, but nobody wants to get in his way), so Java was hard to find and would get you ostracised. IBM had their own bizarre mutant version that ran on their boxen. Microsoft was still not returning Sun's calls after the big court battle over visitation rights, and the version of Java you'd get on any new PC was essentially random in the range of 1..N-1, where N = most recent Java. So, if you wanted to do Java development, Apple was the coolest. ----- But here's the thing. Apple fans may mock Balmer(2) jumping around on stage like an Orangutan screaming 4.('developers!') but Apple doesn't grok developers the way Microsoft does, and probably never will. Apple is just a hair's breadth away from actually disliking developers. There's times when I feel like if they could they'd lock third party devs out and never even shed a tear over it. There's times when they throw us a bone, but those are few and far between. And fairly often they'll just take the bone back. Example: their language support is spotty. They gave up on Java, they supported and then gave up on various trendy languages and their respective Cocoa bridges. Apple may grok consumers (though I'd argue that) but they sure as heck don't get devs. ----- (1) lots of things were cooler back in 2003... nowdays.... not so much. (2) There were plenty of Microsoft fans doing exactly the same mocking of Balmer, so don't interpret this as an 'us vs them' thing |