Additional credit goes to the BSD contributions to OpenJDK that the Mac port is based on.

So are oracle actually supporting Java on mac now? There seemed to be a big fuss about a year ago on this that has died down now.

More to the point , would buying an expensive mac primarily for Java dev be a poor decision at this point?

I bought a Mac to partially do Java development, but I also do .NET development on a Windows VM via Fusion. I've been extremely happy with the setup. I also do Ruby development, and was working in Windows with an Ubuntu VM. I would do Java and .NET on Windows and Ruby (and some Java) in the Ubuntu VM.

With the new consolidation, I've got a solid Unix OS as my primary, and just drop into Windows when I need to work on Windows-specific stuff. It's been great. I don't think I could quite settle for Ubuntu as my primary OS, but Mac OS is a pretty solid day to day operating system. The only thing it's really missing that I haven't settled on is Visio (I know about Visio alternatives, but I need an app that can read and WRITE Visio format).

It started out that Apple wasn't going to support Java and Oracle didn't say anything for a while. Then a month later or so Oracle announced that they had come to an agreement with Apple that would get them the support they needed and they would be supporting Java on Mac OS X from now on.

I think they made it clear during that fuss that Apple were transferring support for Java to Oracle.

A side point that came up at the time: if Apple offered no support, we'd mainly lose a good Swing implementation.

So without Apple's help, we could still use OpenJDK for non-GUI applications. I believe SWT would be fine as well, so Eclipse would remain viable.

Now with Apple contributing into OpenJDK, we have the best-case scenario.