What is the cost of using Arrays.asList to convert static object arrays? Assuming that the object array has N items is it just an O(N) algorithm, where all of the items are
It is cheap, O(1). As you suspect the list is merely a wrapper around the array. This is confirmed by the Java API documentation:
Returns a fixed-size list backed by the specified array. (Changes to the returned list "write through" to the array.)