

Steve Jobs: Flash video not suitable for iPhone - chengmi
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/03/05/tech-adobe-iphone.html

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wallflower
Old (June 2007) but still strangely relevant:

"Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash
as the basis of its AIR and Flex web application strategies. Adobe likes to
advertise that nearly every PC has a Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly
every mobile that has access to the real Internet won't have Flash, making it
far less attractive across the board."

[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-5595-4746-BFCE-524BBA7C7A85.html)

I like Daniel Eran Dilger/RoughlyDrafted because he has some interesting non-
echo-chamber opinions on the world of Apple and technology

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chaostheory
more like Adobe's near monopoly on streaming video isn't suitable for Apple

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iamwil
Yeah, I was also wondering how much of it was strategic positioning on the
part of Jobs. It's probably a little bit of both. iPhone, while packs a punch
for its size is still not a 1GHz+ machine (600MHz, if I remember correctly)
that you can waste cycles on. The "up to par"-ness probably was stated to buy
Apple some time to see if they can do better to circumvent it.

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Electro
I'd agree, it has a feel of an ulterior motive on behalf of Jobs. However
Flash is awful, I haven't noticed a marked improvement in 5 years. The only
reason flash keeps working is because processor power is improving on par with
Flashes impotence.

I'm not surprised in the slightest that the iPhone can't handle flash, because
my old 2GHz machine struggled with larger files. My current laptop can render
1080p, yet in flash it can barely manage the 'large' setting on some streaming
videos.

The iPhone would be perfect for flash games, but it will never be able to run
them because flash is poor for games. They even run slow on my 4GHz laptop;
I've even tried the worst ones on a new four-core (~8GHz) and they still run
poorly. It astounds me that a large corporation like Adobe can't code
performance at all when it would increase the popularity of Flash if it
performed better.

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wmf
Adobe did improve performance dramatically with Flash 9, but only new code
gets the speedup. Many game developers seem to still be generating the old
slow bytecode.

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iamelgringo
Apple has always had issues with non-quick-time video formats and codecs.
Competing video formats were second class citizens for years. I learned this
the hard way studying graphics and animation on Macs for a couple of years.

It doesn't surprise me that Jobs is doing this with the IPhone as well.

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staunch
It's fine that Flash for regular computers and Flash Lite aren't suitable. All
that means is that Adobe and Apple should have been working on a "middle
ground" version over the last 1+ year. They _should_ be announcing the release
now -- those lazy bastards.

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redorb
The phone needs flash support, rather its with adobe or someone else. Without
flash you really can't call it a real web experience.

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mullr
This is an interesting point. Adobe effectively owns a large (likely growing)
portion of the web. And as such, can control any non-standard device that
wants to offer a real web experience.

