“Jobs says Adobe — not Apple — has a closed system because its products are 100 percent proprietary and this conflicts with Apple’s desire to use open standards for the Web,” NPR reports. “‘It’s purely technical. It’s not a very good program for mobile devices,” Leander Kahney, author of the biography Inside Steve’s Brain, tells host Guy Raz. “It’s a CPU hog and it drains battery life very quickly, so he doesn’t want it on it.”
“As recently as six months ago some technology experts thought Flash was would dominate Web multimedia,” NPR reports. “Now some are saying the technology is doomed.”
“This isn’t the first time Apple has taken aim at a mainstream technology,” NPR reports. “In the late 1990s, the floppy drive disappeared after Apple introduced the first iMac with its CD drive. And iTunes and the iPod have slashed sales of CDs.”
NPR reports, “Although Jobs is an intensely private person, Kahney thinks his intentions are good: ‘I think he is genuinely interested in crafting technology that is easy to use for consumers, and Flash wrecks that experience or has the potential to wreck that experience. And so, it’s gone. He’s just extremely ruthless about that.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Flash/Smartphone 2010 = Floppy disc/Computer 1995
The CEO of Adobe won’t be there long.
Bad move to not work well with people in business when they are right.
Steve has right on his side.
@ clinicaltechmaster:
He has to keep fighting for Flash’s survival. Adobe needs to justify their purchase of Macromedia.
He’s not being ruthless – I hate how the media characterizes things so willy nilly. If he was being ruthless, he would ban Flash from Safari on all the Apple platforms. He is ONLY restricting it on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. ONLY, and for a legitimate reason. That being said, I would have no problem doing away with Flash on my Mac as well – it crashes Safari fairly regularly.
Why do all these stories neglect to mention the fact that NO FLASH MOBILE PRODUCT EVEN EXISTS YET??
(…aside from Flash Lite, which doesn’t run everything desktop Flash does and is therefore irrelevant to this discussion…)
You’d think that would be a relevant point to bring up – Adobe doesn’t even have a mobile-ready product despite years of work, and somehow they’ve successfully painted Apple as the roadblock, when Adobe themselves haven’t produced a working product!
It’s interesting to note in all of this turmoil over Flash that no one is making any comparison’s with .pdf’s. PDF’s are way more pervasive than Flash and just as proprietary, yet Apple embraces (licenses) .pdf at the system level so we can create, preview, and print them without a plug in or program. If Apples argument for using Flash was simply that of it not being open, .pdf would be gone too.
It’s not just about open – Flash is buggy, and a big resource hog.
I’m sitting in the dark with my iPad, pretending to be Steve Jobs. I’m issuing fatwas, uh, open letters. Someone just pushed a tray through the feeding hole of this 3600 sq. foot empty room. My dinner. An apple, a banana, 3 lettuce leaves, crisp, lightly seasoned, one thin sclice of American cheese, and a bottle of, oh no… No… NO!!! Crystal Geiser? I fling the tray at the wall and run back to my iPad… … …
Grrrrr Adobe. From helll’s heart, i stab at thee. For hate’s sake I spit at thee!!
Apple does not have to use Flash. It’s a choice, not a requirement. If enough web content providers and consumers believe that it is the wrong decision, then they have a choice – either accept the limitations and enjoy the other advantages of the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, or vote with their dollar by purchasing an Android phone or other mobile device, and accept their combination of limitations and advantages.
SJ has made it clear, just as he has done in the past. This is a technological choice that Apple has made based upon what corporate management believes is best for Apple and its products and consumers long term. It is not up for debate, and Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to bear the short term abuse and controversy that inevitably accompanies a break from the status quo.
In other words, if you don’t like it, tough.
@bitjockey
actually PDF is an open standard.
Display PostScript (used by NeXT) was licenced, I believe PDF (used in OS X) can be used freely.
@bitjockey
PDF is not a web technology.
When my Macbook Pro got slow and hot, Activity Monitor usually showed Safari as the culprit with extremely high CPU usage. When I dug deeper, it was Flash on pages like NYT where the images were continually changing. I removed Flash and the problem disappeared.
Yeah, I thought that PDF was opened up by adobe because it’s free to download and be exported by pages and word.
Adobe shot itself in the foot with the Macromedia deal. They went chasing after the Next Big Thing (NBT) with flash and neglected their current customers and their core strengths. They need to cut that infected foot off and hoble back to the creative market.
Apple already took the video market away from them without any real effort. If they continue with this whiney behavior Steve could release a photoshop killer (not hard to do PS is the best editor out but it still sucks) or a really good HTML 5 development system and just kill them( to kill flash and dreamweaver).
http://mac.wikia.com/wiki/Quartz
http://mac.wikia.com/wiki/Quartz_2D
Jobs sees the future. Just like with floppies and other dead technologies. Flash was useful at one time, but now HTML can do just about everything Flash can do, so it’s on its way out.
Jobs skates to where the puck is going. Unlike Adobe, who are still stuck in the 1990s.
@bitjockey
As others have said, Adobe release the PDF format as an open standard (ISO certified no less) some time in the late ’90s. Prior to that, Jobs’ NeXTstep OS licensed Display Postscript from Adobe to render everything regardless of the output device (monitors, printers, etc)… truly WYSIWYG and device independent.
Mac OS X still uses this technology now known as Quartz — the difference is, it no longer requires a license from Adobe. PDF (2D) and Open GL (3D) are native in Mac OS X for all rendering. The point is, these are open standards.
With Flash, Adobe chose to “sort of” open it up. They published their standards for creating Flash animation, but not applications. It is not ISO certified. They reserved playback of all things Flash to their own proprietary player. So while many apps, including Apple’s Keynote, will export a Flash movie, you can’t import it, and you must use the Flash Player to see it.
Adobe has effectively shot themselves on this one. They kept Flash a closed proprietary development platform for applications. And this dev platform provides its own APIs that may or may not remain in sync with the OS they are deployed on.
The iPhone and iPad OS is actively advancing and improving with each release. If Apple adds to, or modifies their OS, they could break the relationship between the Flash player and consequently make Flash apps unusable until Adobe catches up. Apple will not allow the user experience to be compromised that way.
Adobe should stop whining. Their Flash Development Environment is pretty good, maybe they can use it as a front end to create native Objective C apps or output open standards for playback.
Goodbye Flash….. Your days are numbered
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Fred in da house!!!
Stories like , ‘Oh I switched flash off and my MacBook didn’t get as hot, CPU usage decreased, battery life went up’ prove nothing. It it wasn’t running flash, so it wasn’t doing stuff, of course CPU use goes down, what does that prove? This is no test at all.
As we move towards html5, then the annoying animated ads will appear using html5, and add to the CPU load.
The real test is how efficient is Flash compared to html5. And here independent tests on video efficiency have shown that there isn’t much difference. It depends on the platform and browser as to which was better. And the latest beta for flash OS X is more efficient still as it supports for GPU hardware decoding, at least for a few GPUs.
Jobs is overplaying the efficiency, his main concern is not allowing Adobe to squeeze into a gap between Apple and the App developers – a position of power .’Scandalous’ puts it well above.
@Gabriel:
thankyou for the most intelligent post on this subject
Web apps written in Flash are no different then Web apps written in HTML 5 when it comes to the potential to circumvent the app store.
You don’t see Apple blocking HTML 5 web apps. Apple doesn’t care if people use web apps instead of app store ones; they just want people to use a platform that’s stable, fast and battery efficient. Above all they want people to buy their hardware. If Flash worked well (or at all) on the iPhone, they would support it. The argument a out flash circumventing he app store is retarded.
I use Camino BECAUSE of the flash block feature…and you know what?
In the 3 months that started to use Camino, my browser has not frozen up…or crashed AND it’s WICKED fast….
I will NEVER go back to flash…NEVER….
I will go back to Safari…but only when they add flash block
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I don’t seem to hear much about Adobe’s own conflict of interest. If they boost HTML5 in their own Dreamweaver – do they inadvertently kill Flash faster by their own hand?