Steve Jobs has been speaking behind closed doors to select journalists and explaining some of his reasoning behind exactly why Apple has not added Flash compatibility to the iPad.
While on a trip round the Wall Street Journal offices he offered sound bite after sound bite regarding Flash, noting that the battery performance would be significantly reduced to just 1.5 hours if Flash was on-board – down from the 10 hours he promised in his iPad keynote in January.
Flash backward
According to the WSJ, he also likened Flash to other old-school tech which Apple has ditched, including floppy drives, CDs (because of iTunes) and FireWire cables.
If Jobs did put Flash into the category of floppy drives, then the likelihood of either the iPad, iPod or iPhone getting Flash upgrades is very slight.
Recently Jobs had another pop at Flash, calling the format "buggy".
Adobe is willing to communicate with Jobs over Flash with the iPad but according to Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, "We have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen."
Via MacWorld
Your comments (7) Click to add a new comment
nanaki
April 9th 2010
7. To be honest, it should really be our choice to have Flash on the device - not his. There should just be an option to disable Flash in the browser when it is not needed.
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sparky
February 21st 2010
6. Everytime I go to a flash-based website, on my high-end laptop, the CPU goes up to max usage, and the fan comes on and stays on until I leave that page.
Flash may be good, but it does kill the battery far quicker.
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quatermass
February 20th 2010
5. Easy enough to estimate how much power the running of a program would take without having to actually run it.
Flash is very CPU intense for the ARM CPU. It doesn't have any of the handy instructions that a CISC type processor has.
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mohai
February 20th 2010
4. Oh so accurate, i wonder if they actualy tested this or if they constantly browsed flash pages until it died...
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m185874
February 20th 2010
3. More ********. Not convinced.
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ffrankmccaffery
February 19th 2010
2. Just like wifi? bluetooth? 3G? they're all power intensive technologies too.
Quit taking us for fools as you do with your devotees and admit it - flash would decimate large swathes of your precious app store.
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mobius
February 19th 2010
1. "noting that the battery performance would be significantly reduced to just 1.5 hours if Flash was on-board "
Because they've tested this???
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