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My Beef With Apple
By craig | January 29, 2010
This week’s launch of the Apple iPad came with much hype and eager anticipation. However, shortly after Steve Jobs revealed his latest creation some thrashing reviews started making their way across the internet. To see a summary of the criticism, check out this article on Gizmodo.
One of the glaring flaws is the lack of Adobe Flash support in the iPad Safari browser. As a Flash developer, this omission is a huge slap in the face. I own a iPod Touch and an iPhone. I dearly love both devices despite the fact that neither of them support Flash. I have no problem with this because the iPod Touch and the iPhone are not designed for delivering any sort of “web experience”. Fine. No big deal. Personally I don’t want Flash on these devices.
The iPad is a different story. Steve Jobs touts that the iPad will deliver the “ultimate browsing experience.” Yet without Flash they are neglecting some of the best web experiences in the world. Just check out the FWA for a list of fine examples. The ironic twist is that Apple’s iPad promo materials show sites that display Flash content. The AppleInsider reports on the misleading ad campaign.
The debate is getting quite heated between Adobe and Apple. Lee Brimelow, Adobe Flash Evangelist, made a witty post on his Flash blog. It shows how sites REALLY look when viewing them in iPad’s Safari browser. There is a lot of speculation as to why Apple refuses to include Flash and I won’t delve into that here. But one of the major complaints is that Flash is a CPU hog on the Mac. There is some truth to this complaint – Flash does consume more resources on the Mac than it does on the PC. Why? Because Apple won’t allow Adobe to tap into their api in order to provide for hardware acceleration. Microsoft does.
Topics: Misc. | 2 Comments »
January 31st, 2010 at 1:12 pm
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/
Jobs calls Adobe lazy and says Apple products won’t carry Flash. Also says html5 will replace Flash.
Could this be the beginning of the end for Apple?
February 1st, 2010 at 12:37 am
That’s likely not really what he was saying. It’s hard to get an accurate read on it because the article quotes hearsay. My take on it is that mobile OS devices like iPhone and iPad (such a dumb name) will continue to not have support for Flash, but the desktop and laptop series based on OSX will.
It is a bit disheartening to hear the apparently arrogant tone he takes towards Adobe in general. Granted, churning out CS updates every couple years with minimal new features isn’t good practice, but Apple does the same with it’s yearly updates of iLife and iWork that sometimes seem to have nothing other than a new GUI and an update of the year in the program name (Pages; looking at you).
Jobs needs to calm down and play nice with both Google and Adobe. Let Google Navigation be offered as an app for iPhone (Google has stated they want to offer this for free). Let Adobe help integrate Flash as a user-installable plug-in for mobile Safari. Ease up on the control a bit. If people screw up their experience, so be it. But let customers who spend large amounts of coin on your products make the choice… don’t do it for them.