Indeed, they were somewhat forced to maintain their own port of Sun's JDK because Sun was in a position of power and Apple was perpetually "beleaguered" back then. In contrast, Sun had no choice but to put resources into maintaining the Windows version of the JDK. Perhaps Apple has grown to the point where they can expect Oracle to deliver the JDK on Mac if they want to have a presence there.

If not Oracle, then the OpenJDK community. Either way, if it's wanted badly enough, it will happen.

The long-shot bet would be an LLVM/VMKit implementation that is clean of Sun code.

Maybe they will, maybe not. But for the moment Apple is effectively dropping Java support, and that's not a minor thing.

I'm writing this on an MBP and might well post from a Macbook Air someday but I think Hacker News is giving Apple a very non-Hackerlike treatment. They're clearly moving their computers to a much more controlled iPhone/iPad model.

Somehow I don't think so. Oracle is a pure B2B play. Apple computers are still a rarity in the enterprise, and in those companies that do have Apple computers are most likely not Oracle's target market.

Oracle might try to remedy this situation eventually, but my bet is that it will be too little, too late.

Oracle's products are available for OS X and they need Java for their installers / management consoles.