First-order effects

• Mac developers relying on Apple's bundled JVM face a deprecation clock: their runtime will no longer track Oracle's releases, forcing a choice between frozen Java versions and self-maintained or third-party builds.
• Gosling's public dismissal turns a routine platform-pruning announcement into a credibility fight between Apple's founder and Java's creator, raising the visibility of Apple's rationale beyond the developer mailing lists where it started.

Second-order effects

• Oracle and the open-source Java community inherit the burden of shipping a current JDK on Mac OS X if the Mac Java ecosystem is to survive Apple's exit — a handoff Apple has effectively forced rather than negotiated.
• Other cross-platform runtimes on the Mac read the deprecation as a signal of where Apple's priorities lie as its App Store model matures, and vendors with Mac-hosted developer tools have to plan around Apple controlling which platforms are first-class.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, platform owners increasingly decide which programming environments ship on their hardware, pushing once-standard cross-platform layers like Java into per-platform maintenance by communities rather than guaranteed OS support.
• Java's trajectory gets settled more by its steward's decisions than by any single platform vendor — but each vendor defection, Apple's included, narrows where the language is a default rather than an add-on.