APPLE FANBOI RELIGIOUS ICON Steve Jobs has justified his casting out of Adobe Flash from his gadgets, claiming that the ubiquitous image display software is a CPU resource hog.
In a meeting Jobs spoke forth and said unto executives at the Wall Street Journal that verily Flash is an abomination in his sight, for is it not a CPU hog, full of security holes, and old technology that crashes Mac OS X? He further said that Flash was like unto the floppy drive that he had banished from his Macs.
Thus did Jobs spake and sayeth that Flash shall be flung into the outer darkness and trouble his fanbois not. Verily neither shall it appeareth on the true and holy Ipad, which is the first tablet in the world, nor on the Iphone, which is the only true phone. Jobs spaketh, expecting the attentive executives to nod, and they did nod and wrote down what he had revealed unto them.
Jobs has had it in for Flash for years. Two years ago he said that the PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the Iphone, and that the mobile version, Flash Lite, is not capable of being used with the web.
He also recently moaned to Apple employees that Flash was responsible for all the crashes on the Mac. After all his Mac OS X is perfect and never crashes even when it appears to do so.
Other Jobs anti-Flash claims, however, are simply bizarre. He said that the Ipad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash content. It is incredibly unlikely that the Ipad will manage to play media content using any sort of video software and still deliver ten hours of battery life.
So why does Jobs have it in for Adobe? It is because it is mainstream and big enough to tell him to go forth and multiply. Jobs expects people who supply software for his gadgets to bow and scrape and do just what he tells them to do and nothing else. Adobe software does not work well with Macs but that is also because Steve does not want to adapt his software to Flash rather than the other way around. It would not be difficult to get Flash working on the Mac but Jobs does not want to change any Mac OS X code and Adobe can't be bothered for such a small number of users.
However Jobs' legendary stubborn behaviour is really screwing up Apple users because it prevents them from being able to view Flash content on web pages.
Jobs suggested to the Wall Street Journal that it should abandon the use Flash and use the H.264 video compression system, which is compatible with both the Ipad and the media players installed in most web browsers.
But what Jobs failed to mention is that H.264 is proprietary and patented, and it can't do all the things Flash does. While it can handle video, it does not process interactive graphics, as Flash does.
What Apple fanbois don't understand is that Jobs is making them pay for the fact that he demands his own way and does not want to bend. µ
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