It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.
replyAlong with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.
Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl as this fabulous scripting/glue language, teeny bit of C and MIPS Assembler for the low level courses.
replyWe didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.
There was even a Microsoft Visual J++ (and later J#).
replyIt was definitely the thing for a while. Although I remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my primary impression was "this is so slow".
Java really could have taken over the world, and it can be performant, too.
replyOne of the versions of the most popular game in the world is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very fast.