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Flash on the iPhone: Steve Jobs Should let Users Decide For Themselves

Posted March 5, 2008 9:40 AM by Gregory Ng
Categories: Opinions 

So Steve Jobs says that Flash is not fast enough for the iPhone. Well that’s just great Steve. Way to make the decision for everyone. Here’s a novel idea: why not let the users decide whether it is “sluggish” or not.

The great thing about Jobs’ statement about Flash in the recent shareholder meeting is it confirms what people have frequently discuss: Steve Jobs is a control freak and he makes products for himself. Most people (present company included) just happen to love those products.

But Jobs has been making these types of decisions for us Apple users for years now. Steve doesn’t think we need an optical drive anymore so he puts out the Mac Book Air sans drive. Steve thinks we should be able to watch movies on a tiny iPod Nano screen. I (like others) have eaten up everything he has told us. Like sheep, we have flocked to MacWorld and have hung on every word. In a way, Apple users have become the lemmings that Apple once made fun of.

Well now with his comments on Flash for the iPhone he isn’t talking about whether Flash can work on the iPhone, he is talking about speed. And this comment has convinced me Steve Jobs has finally gone off his rocker. This coming from the man that said AT&T’s EDGE network was fast enough. This coming from someone who pitched the iPhone’s Safari browser as bringing “the real internet on your phone.”

Mr Jobs, you should let users decide whether Flash is sluggish on the iPhone or not.

[Via Information Week]

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Comments

  1. >Here’s a novel idea: why not let the users decide
    >whether it is “sluggish” or not.

    Because the buzz will blame the iPhone, not Flash. Think of having another 10,000 Wozes out there dissing the iPhone. The J-Man knows what he’s doing on this one (but I agree with you on the lack of DVD in the MacBook Air).

    Posted by Danny on March 5, 2008 10:32 AM

  2. "Here’s a novel idea: why not let the users decide”.

    You mean, just like they decided whether Apple should have developed the iPhone in the first place, or even whether or not it should include visual voicemail?

    Posted by Oz on March 5, 2008 10:52 AM

  3. Jobs is talking about the Flash’s processing against iPhone’s CPU, not about download speed!

    Posted by Sergio Gomes on March 5, 2008 11:02 AM

  4. If Flash really sucks performance-wise, then I’d rather Apple not include it in iPhone.  Because if they did include it, then they’d have to be a way to turn it off when it’s depleting the battery.  It would just make the OS more complicated.

    Posted by mark on March 5, 2008 11:08 AM

  5. How do you effect change? If the iPhone/iPod Touch and their decedents, become the most heavily used mobile internet devices, people will create alternatives to using flash. We can at least end the use of flash for video and get back to raw video files so we can use the player of our choosing. Then maybe the interactive bits of flash can be redesigned so it is not so piggish, slow and processor intensive.

    Why did it take the iMac to bring USB main stream when most PC’s included it a year earlier? Because Apple removed the legacy ports. So, is flash in it’s current incarnation ready for a re-write? Maybe, this is all about bringing about substantial change. Maybe it is foolish arrogance?

    Some things Steve and Apple do are risky. Shutting down NBC on iTunes instead of giving in to pricing pressures for example. In the end the goal of apple is to make the most compelling device and I wish them luck. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss the flash content on my iPhone, but I’m willing to watch this play out a bit longer.

    Posted by Doug Petrosky on March 5, 2008 11:23 AM

  6. Doug, Those are all great points. Thanks for bringing those items up.

    Posted by Gregory Ng on March 5, 2008 11:42 AM

  7. Yea, if you let “users” decide, we’re using the RAZR phone and Windows PC - the masses are mostly morons chasing the cheapest buck because they don’t know any better ... like listeing to Adobe or Microsoft ... or you can choose to listen to Steve Jobs.

    Flash is a fun time-killer on a computer but pointless for a phone. It’s like Asteroids. It’s cool retro on a cmputer but do I actually want to pay money to play that? No.

    Flash is 1990’s technology like animated gifs - amusing but ultimately pointless. I choose no crapware for my phone.

    And EDGE is fast enough - unless you’re willing to trade 50% of your battery power to get 10% faster ... not a worthy tradeoff.

    I’d rather have real iphone OSX apps on my iphone

    Posted by jbelkin on March 5, 2008 12:20 PM

  8. i would rather no flash support, one more reason for people to stop using it, plus no ads woop

    Posted by bob on March 5, 2008 12:45 PM

  9. "I (like others) have eaten up everything he has told us. Like sheep,”

    Wow. Why did you do that, and why should we trust your words now, if you have shown yourself to be so gullible in the past?

    Posted by Harvard Irving on March 5, 2008 1:31 PM

  10. Are you new to the planet or something? Steve dictates everything. Get used to it.

    Posted by Anthony on March 5, 2008 1:31 PM

  11. Letting users determine the quality they want is a race to the bottom for Apple. Apple could sell more widgets if they did cheaper (and I mean cheap in every way), lower cost versions, but that isn’t their target. They only sell higher margin items, little decisions like this are critical to them keeping perception of their products at the top. As for the Macbook Air, it isn’t like he got rid of optical drives, he made a NEW product that didn’t have it built in. The ultra light/thin 10” laptops out there don’t have optical drives. Neither do MS UMPCs.

    Posted by sloan on March 5, 2008 1:33 PM

  12. I would say it’s not flash that’s sluggish, rather it’s the iPhone’s slow processor that is actually sluggish.

    Posted by Todd M on March 5, 2008 1:39 PM

  13. Yep, Steve does that. He’s good at that. I’m OK with that.

    A person going without an iPod or iPhone in 2008 would be like a child going without a hula hoop in 1958.

    Posted by Rick Roberts on March 5, 2008 1:43 PM

  14. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    Posted by kc! Bradshaw on March 5, 2008 1:49 PM

  15. Idiot. Appearantly you don’t know anything about phones. Or Flash.

    Posted by The Director on March 5, 2008 1:52 PM

  16. Todd M - comments from ids like you are why putting flash on an iphone ain’t gonna happen - too many people out there who don’t know wtf they are talking about and would blame the iphone for any issues they are having with flash…

    Posted by Jake C on March 5, 2008 1:52 PM

  17. According to this article ( http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9885708-37.html ), Jobs said that Flash “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. That’s very different than “sluggish,” the adjective used by Eric Zeman. The reporter seems to have mischaracterized a couple of other statements as well.

    Posted by Nath3an on March 5, 2008 1:55 PM

  18. I can’t tell if Mr. Ng is being ironic or facetious.  But on the rare chance that he *may* be serious, I’ll give a serious response.  Mr. Ng says “Steve Jobs is a control freak and he makes products for himself.  Most people (present company included) just happen to love those products.”

    Yes, that’s what Mr. Jobs is paid to do.  He is a taste arbitrator.  He is pushing the industry forward (and Apple sales along with it.)

    I’m sure that you remember the hullabaloo that arose when Mr. Jobs decided that Macs no longer needed floppy drives.  And you may also remember that within a year you wondered why you ever needed one.

    Mr. Jobs is paid good stock options to increase Apple’s value, and I think that his flash decision is reasonable.  If you do not, well, perhaps you could suggest another phone that runs Flash to your liking?

    Posted by coyote on March 5, 2008 1:55 PM

  19. I trust Steve Job’s judgement of speed. I’m sure if he was wrong in his assessment of Flash’s speed on the iPhone, others at Apple could convince him otherwise. It stand to reason 1) they’ve tried Flash on the iPhone, and 2) it was terrible.

    Second, the DVD drive is absent from the Air because of weight, not because Apple is getting rid of it. Do you take Steve Jobs for a idiot? OS X ships on DVDs. You think he’d eliminate that revenue? Not to mention, if Apple was getting rid of optical drives 1) it would be gone in the iMac too, and 2) they wouldn’t make a Superdrive accessory. Remember when they eliminated floppies? They didn’t make floppy drive accessories, they left that to third parties.

    Posted by Cameron on March 5, 2008 1:59 PM

  20. You CAN decide. Buy an iPhone/don’t buy an iPhone - I don’t care and neither does Steve. What is it with you people? If you bought a car with NO SatNav, then later on another car manufacturer releases a car WITH SatNav, do you bitch and moan to your dealerthat they should now give you SatNav too? You already made your decision at the cashier. Anything feature that’s missing at purchase time is part of your buy/no buy decision. Any feature that Steve delivers after you buy is a bonus. Get over yourself.

    Posted by Mark on March 5, 2008 2:04 PM

  21. Jobs is right.  Sorry, but I do not WANT Flash on the iPhone.  Flash is a cancer on the web as it is, and if the iPhone keeps people from using it more than that is just fantastic.

    Posted by jeffbax on March 5, 2008 2:05 PM

  22. Users do “decide” whether Flash is important. They vote on a daily basis with their wallets. And obviously there is a significant number of users who have decided that the iPhone meets their needs better than other devices. What is it with “pundits” like yourself who think that they’re opinion is so much better than others? It must hurt to be proven wrong so consistently.

    Posted by Starksy on March 5, 2008 2:08 PM

  23. If you let users decide what they want, you get Microsoft Office.

    Let the designers design. You want other features? Buy another phone.

    Remeber when people bitched there was no FM radio on the iPod? No? Oh yeah, because APPLE WON.

    Posted by John John McLain on March 5, 2008 2:09 PM

  24. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”

    Posted by Burt Brumme on March 5, 2008 2:09 PM

  25. I told Jobs I wanted a better Newton, and all I got was this iPhone 10 years later.

    Posted by infoshaman on March 5, 2008 2:15 PM

  26. There are many complaints that the iPhone doesn’t have Flash, but I’ve yet to hear anyone rave about a phone that does have it. The N95 8GB had it added a while ago, but the reception hasn’t been all roses and candy.

    Flash on the web is broadband-targeted. Screen size, file size, keyboard & mouse, etc. When people ask for it, they want it for YouTube, web games, things not designed for the connectivity or hardware constraints of a mobile device. I’ve tried the Flash 9 experience on the Nokia N800, and it was just OK, not much more. Videos stuttered, sizes were a little off even with an 800 by 480 screen.

    Considering the dearth of mobile-friendly Flash content, I’d rather see Apple resources going into the parts that will produce great mobile content.

    I get that the iPhone has the critical mass to get people to make new mobile Flash content, but they are in a unique place to perhaps push forward tech that is better suited for the device, and perhaps even more open, so why not wait and see if they can do it?

    Point is, there is no clear alternative, a phone with a unbeatable Flash experience, and I suspect there are good reasons why.

    Posted by Noah on March 5, 2008 2:17 PM

  27. There is one simple reason Flash isn’t on the iPhone:

    Pandora.

    With Pandora there is no need for iTunes Music store, users can stream music to their phones without paying the 99 cents for the songs.

    Oh wait, there is more.

    With Flash, no YouTube lockdown. With Flash, no games being locked out.

    The technology reasons are BS plain and simple. Ng is right on with this one.

    Posted by Dale on March 5, 2008 2:24 PM

  28. Flash IS too slow… Just look at how much CPU time it hogs on the desktop. It uses CPU for everything and doesn’t take advantage of graphics hardware… If Adobe got their shit together and leveraged the GPUs on the desktop and OpenGLES on mobile platforms (iPhone and Android etc) then maybe it’d find its way onto the iPhone.

    Adobe should have been able to see it coming.

    Posted by Andrew on March 5, 2008 2:25 PM

  29. Dude, you’re joking right?

    No, I guess from your tone, you’re not… You’re the one off your rocker!

    This USER is never reading iPhone Matters again. I’ve “decided.”

    Posted by Dennis on March 5, 2008 2:25 PM

  30. To all you Apple apologists out there explain to me how the iPhone can play movies but doesn’t have enough CPU to render flash?

    Please, educate me.

    Posted by Dale on March 5, 2008 2:27 PM

  31. "Steve Jobs is a control freak and he makes products for himself. Most people (present company included) just happen to love those products.”

    a dose of control can guarantee a concept becomes a final product without distorting, feature-creeping, feature-lacking, or generally sucking. the best products tend to be from people who created them for a specific purpose out of need or inspiration, not from people looking for a way to make bank off something lame whether they or anyone else actually needs it. i submit that products like ipod/itunes wouldn’t be half as smooth, functionally and otherwise, if steve and the engineers didn’t use them on a personal level. it means they CARE about what they offer.

    also, apple HAPPENS to know better than to offer products they don’t think people will love. you thought maybe their budding consumer approval was blind luck?

    “But Jobs has been making these types of decisions for us Apple users for years now. Steve doesn’t think we need an optical drive anymore so he puts out the Mac Book Air sans drive. Steve thinks we should be able to watch movies on a tiny iPod Nano screen.”

    the air is about portability and leanness, so they tried something new. i wish more companies would both think this freely and have the finesse to pull it off.

    he DOESN’T think we DON’T need an optical drive, which is why they engineered a way to share any drive on either of 2 platforms, and why they offer an external drive. if you care about having one that much, and want it to be built in, then don’t get an air. it’s not for you. it IS exactly what some people are looking for. i wonder how long before die-hards figure out the logic behind this ultralight niche. it’s like saying a prius sucks beucase you want to be able to haul fill or outrun cops.

    people wanted video on nanos, and apple figured they would move well. they were right.

    steve’s had many other absurdly wonderful ideas, like computers without floppy drives. when’s the last time you needed to read a 1.4MB floppy with a mac? right again.

    Posted by mangoduck on March 5, 2008 2:29 PM

  32. Have you seen how fast Flash tends to run on embedded devices? Take a Nokia N800 or N810 for instance (I have one sitting right here). It’s painfully slow. Despite Nokia’s claims, it’s no fun to watch a Youtube video on one of these things.

    I imagine the iPhone wouldn’t be much faster.

    Posted by Mike K. on March 5, 2008 2:29 PM

  33. Dale…

    Hardware accelerated H.264 decoding…

    http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review.ars/14

    Posted by Andrew on March 5, 2008 2:32 PM

  34. NG has never been an expert, and knows nothing about what he writes. Scribbling opinions based on rumors or none provable factoids does not a tech writer make.

    As for Flash on Phones or any where else- IT SUCKS
    It sucks cpu cycles
    It sucks hard drive space
    It sucks background app memory

    Few know how to call small vector graphics - many cant prepare images for flash to start with. Its a mess right now.

    Thats not Jobs or the Iphones fault.

    Inj

    Posted by gimme ngs job on March 5, 2008 2:33 PM

  35. Yes indeed, why not let users decide if Flash is too slow. Add Windows application support, Active X, Java, support for OGG, DiVX too. Release a version with a keyboard, and a joystick. And one that plugs into the wall only - no batteries! The users will figure it out. No they won’t - they’ll just stop buying it.

    I’ll take an elegant device that does what it does great, and you can write articles that make no sense what-so-ever.

    Posted by Scott on March 5, 2008 2:38 PM

  36. @Dale: I don’t think playing movies is nearly as CPU-intensive as running Flash. When I play movies on my MacBook, the fans stay silent, while they ramp up tremendously when I load up Flash websites.

    Thus, I can see the iPhone CPU being adequate for video but not for Flash. Does the iPhone have some sort of dedicated video hardware? Perhaps it employs that when playing movies.

    Posted by Larry V on March 5, 2008 2:39 PM

  37. @Andrew: I guess it does smile

    Posted by Larry V on March 5, 2008 2:41 PM

  38. @Dale:
    “With Pandora there is no need for iTunes Music store, users can stream music to their phones without paying the 99 cents for the songs.”

    Surely you’re joking.

    a) Bit-rate. EDGE in ideal conditions will not stream high quality audio. In less ideal conditions it will be terrible. Without fancy dynamic bit rate games, you’ll have to put up with quite poor quality music.

    b) Network utilization. Every iPhone user streaming music would take down AT&T’s network. It’s terribly inefficient.

    c) Battery usage. All that network traffic will kill your battery. The iPhone gets around 24h of music playback time off a single charge. That requires *very* careful power management and detailed optimization of data paths within the *hardware* of the device. You are not going to get anything near that performance out of general purpose applications.

    d) User interface. You’re claiming Pandora is as fast and responsive as the coverflow UI? I haven’t seen a device with the same responsiveness and usability with *large* music libraries than the iPhone and iPod.

    Sorry, but the technical facts get in the way of your argument. Flash on the iPhone would not result in Pandora unseating the iTunes Music Store.

    Posted by gopi on March 5, 2008 2:45 PM

  39. the iphone and itouch both use quicktime , there is no graphic hardware-card- or separate GPU.

    Posted by gimme ngs job on March 5, 2008 2:47 PM

  40. Outside of porn (eg: redtube.com), games (eg: joecartoon.com), car manufacturer sites, flash developer websites and flash ads, I’m not sure what flash is actually used for. Frankly, I’m not interested in watching porn on my iphone when I have a perfectly good laptop for that, I can get along without flash games, I never look at car manufacturer sites even when I’m buying a car, I’ve always hated flash ads and I feel anyone who produces a flash-only website is a freaking moron. Judging from sales of the iPhone, I’m not alone in these opinions.

    I’ve asked this question over and over when the issue of Flash on the iPhone comes up, and I’ve never gotten an answer. I’m beginning to think the only reason people want flash on the iPhone is because it’s not there, not for any useful reason. I’m not one to judge other people’s potential use of the iphone, but berating Apple over what appears to be a valid exclusion of an inferior product is just plain ignorant and calls your intelligence into question.

    Seriously, I have to get me a paid blogging job. Apparently, there are no qualifications beyond a pulse and the ability to hit a keyboard with your hands most of the time.

    Posted by Dogzilla on March 5, 2008 3:05 PM

  41. @Dale

    Well, first Pandora isn’t a competitor to iTunes. If anything, Apple loves Pandora because people find new music on Pandora; new music they will buy on iTunes. Pandora isn’t a giant music library where you play what you want, you can only skip so many songs, all they decide everything for you.

    Second, all consumer computers can use iTunes and Pandora. If your assumption that Pandora would kill iTunes, then it would have already happened on every consumer computer in the world. But it hasn’t. iTunes is doing great.

    Of course, like others have mentioned above, Pandora would make a horrible experience, and the iPhone has hardware acceleration for h.246 and audio.

    Are you really thinking this though?

    Posted by Cameron on March 5, 2008 3:09 PM

  42. You know what? I believe him.
    Flash is horribly, horribly slow on older machines, and it probably would run like crap on the iPhone’s slow CPU.

    Metanet software, the guys who wrote the popular flash game N, have stated on several occasions that flash is just really slow.

    The EDGE network has nothing to do with this; it’s a really bad comparison. Flash would eat up CPU and drastically shorten the battery life. In addition, flash animations probably wouldn’t even play at the right speed, de-syncing the audio and video. Oh, and if the iPhone plugin is anything like the one for Linux, it would hang various webpages for several seconds for no apparent reason.

    Sorry Ng, but Steve is right. Flash *is* slow.

    On a side note, flash isn’t the real internet. The real internet is full of open standards; standards that don’t require $700 software packages to create content.

    Posted by James on March 5, 2008 3:13 PM

  43. Flash is the next ActiveX.

    Remember how MS co-opted the open-standards web initiative by putting proprietary ActiveX controls in web pages?

    Flash is no different. It’s not open; the source is not available.  It’s *owned* by Adobe. Period.

    The world is finally moving towards an open web, and that includes h.264.

    Adobe is adding h.264 because Flash video is becoming aged and irrelevant.
    Flash animations are not hardware optimized, so it’s a huge drain on battery.

    I tend to think Apple had enough clout with Google to convince them to re-encode everything in h.264, but Google is benefitting as well by becoming less dependent on someone else’ technology.

    Sure, Steve is a control freak, but not in omitting Flash support from the iPhone:  he learned his lesson about depending on Adobe in the past with Display PostScript and no one in their right mind would let that kind of dependence happen again.

    If you look at the longer-term view, deprecating Flash in favor of an open standard like mpeg4 and h.264 (and AAC-LC, for that matter) is better for consumers.

    Just like omitting the floppy drive from the iMac.

    Just like building out an interim infrastructure for the eventual death of optical drives.

    In my personal option, Steve can see abstract futures, but so can a lot of people.  What makes him different is that he has figured out the concrete steps to take to make those futures *real*.

    Posted by God Of Biscuits on March 5, 2008 3:28 PM

  44. "Here’s a novel idea: why not let the users decide”.

    At CNNMoney.com, Job’s responded to a question with the following quote attributed to Henry Ford:  ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.“‘

    That says it all.

    Posted by Oz on March 5, 2008 3:55 PM

  45. Dale—are you an idiot? Playing back a movie is just decompressing and relaying a continous stream of bits. To implement Flash fully the CPU must be able to calculate the *position* (and not just the colour) of every bit.

    Ever hear of the difference between vector and bitmap? Ever notice how long it takes to open a PDF compared to a JPEG of the same information?

    Playing back a movie is very, very far from the most CPU intensive task the web has to offer.

    You have been educated.

    Posted by DBL on March 5, 2008 4:01 PM

  46. Not to make this “Jump on Dale” day, but you are claiming lack of flash locks users into iPhone specific media channels (like YouTube or getting video via the ITMS).

    Nothing could be further from the truth.  Mobile video can be streamed easily from any site using h.264, which the iPhone will happily play back.  I can also load my own videos into iTunes and from there transcode them to work in the iPhone just fine.

    Have you actually used flash on other mobile devices?  Flash is pure and simple targeted at desktops and laptops, in any capacity where it offers any value.  For the person who said the iPhone processor must be too slow, note that the iPhone actually sports a faster processor than most smartphones on the market today.

    In actual use I have not missed flash at all, and I agree with the person who said Flash is the next ActiveX.  With the impressive degree of things that can be done with DHTML alone, Flash sits in a weird place between real desktop applications and web apps.

    Posted by Kendall on March 5, 2008 4:26 PM

  47. Dale, the iPods have dedicated video decoding chipsets, that’s why. MPEG4 is just a stream of digitized image and sound data that needs converting. There is no comparison with Flash. Think of it: Flash itself has an MPEG4 decoder.

    Flash is an entire development platform that leans heavily on vector art computations (scaling, animation, etc.). Flash is more comparable to Java than a video format, and to my knowledge there isn’t a cellphone that runs a full Java implementation, just the special subset designed for mobile devices (J2ME).

    In fact, the very existence of Flash Lite (The J2ME of Flash) should say a lot about how robust Flash is when not on a desktop computer.

    Posted by Noah on March 5, 2008 4:26 PM

  48. Henry Ford once said ‘If I’d given people what they wanted, I’d have made a faster horse’

    One of the reasons Apple products are so successful is that they are the product of a vision and not a rush to follow the crowd.

    Posted by Tony on March 5, 2008 4:36 PM

  49. Let’s just hand over all design and engineering decisions to the rest of us. Heck, why do we need Apple?

    Posted by Jason Clarke on March 5, 2008 4:36 PM

  50. i’d like to weigh in on the usefulness of flash, because i get the impression that some people think it’s only for video. mpeg and such do not replace flash. i say again, encoded video files do not replace a scriptable interactive vector graphics platform. youtube and ilk may unintentionally promote that misconception because many realize they deliver video via flash, but they’re not aware of the scripting behind the player interface and video controls. they’re not stock widgets, everything is built.

    flash is treated as a novelty when it’s used that way - thrown together overnight web sensation animations can be funny once or twice, but they tend to hurt the media type’s reputation. rich interactive applications can be built, on or offline, that really show off flash’s flexibility. a cool example of applied eye candy is the “bubble” exploration mode available on youtube when a video is fullscreened, next to the pause button. such a thing isn’t so well suited to dhtml + ajax, and would require at least as much cpu time to render the page.

    my top 2 gripes with flash though, are openness of format and accessibility. the latter is a hard one to address due to the very nature of the media. no other type of media (besides shockwave) offers that level of control over so many elements and brings them together as cohesively, but i doubt flash could do that without being as closed as it is (in terms of the content being locked into a rectangle (usually) and integrated in only limited ways with the document model because it’s a plugin). catch, there. annoying, but there’s something even whole-widgety about it, if you follow me.

    for anyone interested, check out gotoandlearn.com for video tutorials of advanced flash capabilities. the “flash inspiration” video is goodness.

    regarding steve’s statement, flash would most certainly be slow on a mobile processor, which would hurt user experience, which would hurt apple’s image. intel’s atom procs may change things, so i’d keep an eye on it.

    Posted by mangoduck on March 5, 2008 4:51 PM

  51. Steve Jobs left the floppy drive off the iMac too, remember. Before we even had Flash Drives to replace them.

    Man, I remember the outcry then.

    But he was right. He usually is.

    Posted by Joel Fagin on March 5, 2008 4:55 PM

  52. Reasons why Flash can be important/useful: Basically, there are some poorly designed websites out there that rely on Flash to do navigation that are still necessary for one reason or another. Example: at my old job, one of our suppliers used a website that required Flash for navigation… and had specimen labels and Material Safety Data Sheets that we needed to download. No alternate non-Flash link. Not much you can do in situations like that, when you *have* to access the site and the designer is stupid and requires Flash.

    In all other respects, I agree, Flash is mostly frivolous. Occasionally there’s a fun game done in Flash, but by and large it’s a resource pig and can cause major bottlenecks and even SPOD’s in Safari. I loathe Flash ads. I wouldn’t cry if Flash died a lonely and unmourned death.

    That said, looking at the actual technical aspects, I also have to agree with da Jobs. Like a couple of others, I’ve used Flash on the Nokia Internet Tablets, and been highly unimpressed. Slow, sometimes barely usable. That, along with my negative experiences using Flash on the desktop/laptop, and some of the other technical issues noted in this thread (dedicated decoder hardware for video, Flash not using GPUs natively, etc.) carries a heck of a lot more weight than paranoid ranting about locking users into Apple-Approved media channels.

    Posted by Travis Butler on March 5, 2008 5:00 PM

  53. All I have to say about no Flash on the iPhone is - Good riddance!

    I have yet to see Flash used for something that doesn’t waste my time. Web site introductory pages - WTF? Flash based navigation that does nothing more than change the colour of words when you mouseover - WTF? Flash based drop-down menus, in a web site - WTF? Product information pages that take 30 seconds to animate the words onto the page, when I can tell within 2 seconds after the page has rendered that it doesn’t have the information I’m looking for - WTF!

    Flash slows you down by requiring more junk to be downloaded to render the same information. Flash slows you down by taking 30 seconds to do what a plain HTML page could do in 2 seconds.

    The Internet will be a better place for people trying to solve problems, when the useless crap like flash and animated banner ads are gone.

    Posted by Alex on March 5, 2008 5:41 PM

  54. Mr. Ng, you should be aware that Mr. Jobs has probably actually seen what Flash looks like in Safari Mobile on the iPhone/iPod touch and probably knows far better than us whether or not it will run acceptably.

    Posted by Paul Douglas on March 5, 2008 5:42 PM

  55. LOL.

    Posted by Me on March 5, 2008 5:52 PM

  56. If Jobs let the users decide things, they’d be selling bloated, over-featured products like Dell et al.

    Posted by Justin Bell on March 5, 2008 7:01 PM

  57. In Jobs we trust! How dare you Mr Ng! You heretic! Please do not the almighty! Allow us to suck-our-thumbs in peace. We will all be obedient little Appleites as long as our binky is in control.

    I swear if Jobs sold his own iUrine you fools would be lining up at 3:00AM to buy it.

    Posted by Amazing Larry on March 5, 2008 7:26 PM

  58. Let’s see. Ford doesn’t put jet engines on the Mustang… “too impractical” according to their engineers and management.  Cost too much to run, dangerous, and, besides, there’s a standard *gasoline* engine available which is much more appropriate to the purpose and scale of the product.

    So you would prefer that Ford put a jet engine on every Mustang so that YOU can determine whether it’s all those things or not?

    Why don’t we let the engineers design the product—they generally know what they’re doing.  If you don’t like what they deliver, buy a product that you think is better.

    Posted by stevebert on March 5, 2008 7:36 PM

  59. Many of the commenters here have nailed it on the head, but one thing i haven’t seen mentioned is that to include flash, Apple would be at the mercy of Adobe. If Adobe wanted to update flash, but didn’t feel like updating the iPhone version, Apple would have to beg Adobe for an update.

    If Flash ran slow and crappy, Apple would be powerless to do anything about it, and while Apple begsAdobe to get their crap together and write a more efficient iPhone plugin, thousands of pundits around the world would sit there crying about how “Apple messed up and needs to fix their flash support.”

    Has Apple ever been known to just hand over so much control to an outside company? (especially one with a long history of late updates and poor performance? )

    Not to mention that Flash is a proprietary piece of CPU hogging crap, and if Apple has an opportunity to push the market to a more open solution (and one that they can control their own implementation of) i’d ALWAYS bet on that being their course of action.

    Outside of ads, games, and animations, 90% of what Flash is used for should really be done with AJAX or some sort of DHTML. (Look at Apple’s site, now totally free of any flash, and arguable prettier and more functional.) The other 10% are extremely specialized (Pandora) which could be written as native apps, or totally over the top crap sites like more car manufacturers, which are usability/accessability nightmares that i’d love to see rapidly disappear.

    Posted by Jeff Foster on March 5, 2008 7:39 PM

  60. Flash is PC software. Read the system requirements. PC’s run at 2 GHz and more and have general purpose CPU’s, and Flash is notoriously slow on there.

    The iPhone has a phone CPU running at 0.4 GHz. We’re not talking about “slow but you can use it” we’re talking about “1 frame per second” video.

    The reason iPhone ca show video at all is it has an h.264 decoder chip in there. There is no hardware chip for Flash video, it has to be decided by the CPU. Sloooooooooow.

    Posted by Hamranhansenhansen on March 5, 2008 7:42 PM

  61. Who gives a shit?

    Posted by Driveby on March 5, 2008 8:04 PM

  62. I’m not sure if you have used Flash on a mobile device, but check out a Nokia N tablet of your choosing. Not long ago I would have chosen Flash a development environment so to speak for mobile applications, however looking at the current road map, ActionScript 3.0 on the desktop, ActionScript 2.0 on mobile, differing limitations and no persistence of memory, the question becomes, why waste the time?

    I purchased each Nokia tablet specifically to see how Flash ran. It did not run well. Right now, I’d rather see Java of indeterminate flavor than Flash. It would be more useful. Flash has been locking up on my very current iMac for the last week. Do I really wish to have my phone ceasing to function while it sorts out the connection issues? Not really!

    As somebody mentioned, it probably does run on OS X “lite” currently. Choice was involved, and I’m sure that Adobe is aware of the reasons. They just have to decide which product needs to be updated first. Photoshop would be my choice!

    Posted by Nicholas on March 5, 2008 8:33 PM

  63. BTW, I purchased an iMac as opposed to a PowerMac specifically because Adobe applications were not available for Leopard. I’m sure Steve likes loosing thousands of dollars every time a customer makes a rational decision regarding available software.

    I’m looking forward to Photoshop running well on my purchase.

    Posted by Nicholas on March 5, 2008 8:38 PM

  64. Hey Greg, you got working by Gruber, i think that might be an honor tho.

    @nicholas whatever the eff you said about buying an imac because photoshop wont run on leopard doesn’t make sense. im running 10.2 and photoshop dl’ed straight from adobe then cracked is working just fine thank you.

    Posted by Andy Clark on March 5, 2008 9:11 PM

  65. Apple has cocoa & the core graphics technologies to handle the interface & development...they do not need flash for this.

    Posted by JS on March 5, 2008 10:13 PM

  66. "Dale—are you an idiot? Playing back a movie is just decompressing and relaying a continous stream of bits. To implement Flash fully the CPU must be able to calculate the *position* (and not just the colour) of every bit.

    Ever hear of the difference between vector and bitmap? Ever notice how long it takes to open a PDF compared to a JPEG of the same information?

    Playing back a movie is very, very far from the most CPU intensive task the web has to offer.

    You have been educated.”

    Sorry - have to take issue with this. Playing back video is a far more processor-intensive task than playing back vector animations. Vector animations are stored as mathematical formulae which are quite small, and which have to be calculated. Video streams have to be decompressed - noone sends an uncompressed digital stream because it’s just too huge - *and* deal with a large amount of data. This not only taxes a processor far more than vector animation does, but it also consumes memory and possibly disk throughput. This issue is so prevalent with the new compression algorithms (eg: h.264) that Apple has included a dedicated H.264 DAC decoder chip that does nothing but address this issue, which is why your iPhone plays back video content from ITMS or your rips quite nicely. However, Flash video generally uses On2 VP6, which has no hardware acceleration and would kill the iPhone.

    Posted by Dogzilla on March 6, 2008 12:10 AM

  67. You are all completely wrong. Flash would not be too slow on the iPhone. The Nokia N8xx tablets use an ARM processer at 300MHz and they can run flash well enough to play back youtube videos at a reasonable rate. The iPhone has a processor nearly twice as fast. So how come it would be too slow???

    Or is Jobs admitting that the OSX on the iPhone is so inefficient. I can’t believe that when the iPhone can do all the graphical effects so smoothly. It just comes down to that Apple doesn’t like flash. So you are all out of luck.

    Posted by Jody on March 6, 2008 12:45 AM

  68. @Jody: Sorry. I’ve used Flash on the N800’s, and it’s a dog. Speed ranges from slow to barely usable, as I mention above. And unless I’ve miscounted, everyone else in the thread who’s said they’ve actually used one has said pretty much the same thing.

    Second, the N800’s ARM processor runs at 400MHz, not 300. Under OS 2007, it was run at a slower-rated 330MHz, but OS 2008 runs it at the full 400MHz.

    Posted by Travis Butler on March 6, 2008 1:10 AM

  69. @Jody:

    We’re all completely wrong?  Really?

    many of us did not make any comment about the iPhone being able to deliver Flash, but rather that it would drain the battery far morequickly than any 3G radio would.

    The bigger issue, which you fail to address, is that Jobs has had experience being beholden to Adobe, and Apple has invested a LOT of money tearing people away from proprietary technology on the web. That means ActiveX; that means Flash.

    Are you so desperate to depend on Flash UIs on web pages that you’ll settle for half the battery life?

    There are better ways to do UIs than slap fancy bitmaps all over the place and hit test after the fact.

    Posted by God Of Biscuits on March 6, 2008 1:28 AM

  70. "Sorry - have to take issue with this. Playing back video is a far more processor-intensive task than playing back vector animations. Vector animations are stored as mathematical formulae which are quite small, and which have to be calculated. Video streams have to be decompressed - noone sends an uncompressed digital stream because it’s just too huge - *and* deal with a large amount of data. This not only taxes a processor far more than vector animation does, but it also consumes memory and possibly disk throughput.”

    Answer (a). Depends on what’s in the Flash file. Animations have to be updated just as many times per second as movies.

    Answer (b). Flash files are *also* compressed, as *well* as vectored.

    Answer (c). Believe your eyes. Install a CPU usage graph and go around playing random videos, and random Flash movies. You will see that in practical terms you are 100% wrong.

    Posted by DBL on March 6, 2008 10:41 AM

  71. @Jody

    Stuff like YouTube is one of the lightest possible tasks Flash is asked to perform. Why, again—because there is no vector art in YouTube vids, Flash is just being used as a wrapper for the purpose of wider compatibility. This is why there are many computers which can comfortably play YouTube but which have very serious troubles with any other kind of large-windowed Flash.

    Apple found the perfect solution: save the YouTube—ditch the rest.

    Posted by DBL on March 6, 2008 10:45 AM

  72. Flash sucks!

    Posted by Dubb on March 6, 2008 11:20 AM

  73. You’re funny. You chose to purchase something, now you’re complaining that the device you purchased doesn’t have or will add a feature that you KNEW wasn’t there to begin with.

    You painted yourself into a corner and now your asking for a choice? Huh? Your choice to paint was BEFORE you got yourself into that mess.

    Dangit - my car doesn’t fly. The FAA says I can’t - the nerve! Who are they to tell me what I can and can’t do. Dern car manufactures, I want the option.

    Welcome to life.

    Posted by Anon on March 6, 2008 4:17 PM

  74. Stuff written in anger and frustration rarely is intelligent. You obviously want something to happen enough to not think it through all the way and empathically so.

    Not that I don’t sympathize, we all want want want and what do we get? But hey, in the words of Sinatra: “that’s life”.

    Posted by zpok on March 7, 2008 12:44 AM

  75. if you want to play Flash Games on the internet then this is the great place for it >> http://www.dflashgames.com/

    Posted by flash games on March 20, 2008 5:42 PM

  76. Nice! I’ve bookmarked it http://www.propeller.com/submit/checkstory :D

    Posted by Kathleen I Smith on May 5, 2008 4:26 AM

  77. I just bought my Iphone and I love it. I just need to know if I can get videos on there I cant seem to get my mustang parts video on there does anybody know who I should contact

    Posted by Brian on May 6, 2008 2:58 PM

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