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Just the other day I blogged about how I thought that Apple‘s recycling of the Core 2 Duo in the new MacBook Air was a precursor to Apple wanting to move towards using their own CPU’s in future Mac devices and killing off all non Apple languages was one of the things they needed to do in order to make it happen.

I didn’t think they would start doing that so aggressively soon though. Talk about outlandish confidence.

Amazingly, just as soon as Apple quietly announced just a few days ago that they would no longer create future JVM’s for Mac nor distribute it with OSX, they have also announced that they will also no longer distribute Flash with OSX either, unifying their anti flash policy for iOS devices with the Mac.

This has spurred a lot of discussion amongst the developer community about the Mac App Store in general and Apple’s attitude towards non-Apple languages, including this great article on gdgt about whether the Mac App Store can credibly get enough apps in it to be able to blatantly slap so many non-Apple language developers in the face… again.

In this same article, Jason Calcanis remarked in the comments section “how long till Apple only allows Apps on Macs via the Mac App Store?” – a similar sentiment that I was getting at in my last blog…

Well, to do that, Apple would have to also kill their own Dev environment Carbon and effectively leave Cocoa as the only way to develop for the Mac (which of course, is what you use to develop for the App Store).

My reaction to that is – of course they would do it! I can just imagine it now – Lion would be the last of the OSX series which has legacy support for Carbon and Apple would finally do a major update to Mac OS (after over a decade flogging the old OSX horse) with a more iOS centric OS called Mac OSXI Predator. Mac have been well known for a while to have a disdain for software developers who continue to develop in Carbon and this might just twist the knife in their backs, finally.

Of course, Apple couldn’t just outright say that Mac users can only install apps from the App Store – they would just leave behind Cocoa as the only tool to build apps for inside or outside of the App Store. This would effectively make the App Store the only way to get good software, especially if they add a security prompt ala Vista that says something like “you are running an application that does not come from a trusted source and may make your system unstable. Are you sure you want to continue?”. The FUD angle would work well and Apple would have what they want – full control over the Mac experience in addition to the iThingy experience.

The interesting part would be how much notice Apple would give developers that they were ditching Carbon with the next OS after Lion if it were to happen – it took Adobe a looooong time to finally build 64bit versions of Creative Suite for Mac and Apple’s biggest software partner – Microsoft – still develop all of their Mac products in Carbon too. Lots of other longtime Mac applications are written in Carbon as well, as software developers who have made the initial investment in building a product for Mac don’t want to have to rewrite their software from the ground up for a platform that only has around 5% global market share currently.

Apple, naturally, have been working very hard behind the scenes to port all of their applications to Cocoa for a while now and you can bet your bottom dollar that if Apple tried to ditch Carbon and only their own versions of Video Editing and Productivity software, for example, were available to customers on that new platform, the big guys like Adobe and Microsoft would be screaming blue murder. Apple would simply reply that if these companies had of started developing for iOS when they were SUPPOSED to, then they wouldn’t have that problem.

Really, the genius of the whole thing is obvious – they would not only screw Intel out of any future profit from the Mac platform, they would screw the big software companies that they hate like Adobe and Microsoft and use web apps as the excuse that they can get away with it in the limitation of choice argument, which works out well for Google, Facebook and the other new breed in IT. Apple would be the new new big daddy of computing to these companies and The First Galactic Empire would be born from the Republic.

It’s a very interesting thing that you can expect to see happen and it’ll be even more interesting to see what the reaction to it will be from customers, partners, developers and US an international government agencies. We’ll find out once and for all who the real fanboys are pretty soon, it seems.

In the meantime, for all the developers who are crying about how they paid a fortune for Mac computers and now can’t use them properly to do their jobs – you can always install Bootcamp and/or VM software and install either Windows or Linux. Or, you can keep this in mind when you make your next PC or mobile purchase and buy something that will actually work for you.

Just saying.

Related articles

• Apple actions on Flash and Java, app store restrictions fuel incipient Orwellian paranoia (teleread.com)
• Apple stops bundling Adobe Flash player on Macs (guardian.co.uk)
• Apple not committing to Java support in Mac OS X 10.7 (news.cnet.com)
• Java Founder Calls Steve Jobs a Liar, Gets Attacks by Apple’s Mob (techrights.org)
• A take on today’s announcements from Apple (feldmanfile.blogspot.com)