Apple Corrects iPad Promo Video to Show No Flash Capability

[sohelpme]

Yes, like the people who whined until Apple brought back anti-glare on MBP's and firewire on the MBP 13". They weren't that many, and they weren't organized, but they got their way.

I recognize that some people take pleasure in nurturing this notion of Apple being so big and mighty that the company can just scoff at customer demands until the world rethinks and capitulates, but it just isn't so. Apple is as fearful of a backlash as the next company is.

I'll bet that Apple ignored the initial negativity and bad press when they first shipped those models. But I'll bet they noticed sales trends, and what their customers told their sales agents in Apple stores about those changes, and it was a large enough group of people that they wanted to include.

I'll also bet that Apple believes that the headache, expense and added cost of supporting Flash on their mobile devices:
a) doesn't significantly result in lost sales. Past trends for iPhone and iPod Touch sales bear this out. I would say particularly sales for the original iPhone exceeding Apple's sales projections with the much larger outcry about the lack of Flash support, with NO sites except YouTube having a non-Flash way of accessing their site specifically for the iPhone.
b) doesn't advance the state of the internet at all. Flash was necessary 5 years ago to deliver video and highly interactive sites to internet clients. Today, between HTML5, AJAX/Javascript tools/libraries, and even native web clients [native Apps that use web sites as storage, ie, the cloud], present better ways for clients to interact. And don't forget, all those Flash sites need to be re-developed for the iPad anyway [if it supported Flash], because they all are designed for desktop mouse/keyboard interaction, not multitouch interaction.
c) increases engineering costs and per-unit costs and reduces battery life, as Apple has to include additional hardware video decoding chips just so that Adobe's Flash-lite code can run on mobile CPU's. Adobe glosses over this, but that's the only way they could get it to work well on mobile devices, namely, cut features from the full desktop Flash plugin AND require that devices must include hardware video decoding that must get hooked up just right to Adobe's code. Hell, they even used to call it Flash-Lite, until the iPhone came out and SJ slagged it in his original presentation for the iPhone, so Adobe added SOME more features from the full plugin, increased the system requirements so those features would work, then rebranded it as just 'Flash' [basically claiming it's the same as the full desktop version while it doesn't actually have the same capabilities].

 

[mosx]

WHO THE HELL cares about Blu-Ray and its DRM-ridden technology?

DRM ridden technology? My blu-ray player works just fine. Connect a single cable to my receiver, the HDMI cable, and another HDMI cable from the receiver to the TV. Want to watch it on Windows? Just put the disc in the drive.

And who cares about blu-ray? A lot of people, considering blu-ray adoption rate is faster than DVDs adoption rate was.

Blu-Ray is stillborn

Again, blu-ray is being adopted at twice the rate DVD was. If you compare blu-ray and DVD adoption rates at the same time in their life cycles, DVD had 4% market share at 2.5 years in. Blu-ray had 8%. Blu-ray continues to grow at a faster rate than DVD did.

has only marginal benefit over DVDs...there is simply no comparison with the REAL leap made from VHS to DVD

Wow you can't be serious. The resolution jump from VHS to DVD was 4.5x. Blu-ray resolution is 6x greater than DVD. You're going from 345k pixels to 2 million pixels. Not only the pixel count, but video encoding too. MPEG-2 to H.264 and VC-1 at bitrates up to 10x that of DVD video.

Not to mention the audio. DVDs generally have Dolby Digital audio tracks encoded at 448kbps. The vast majority of blu-ray discs have either lossless Dolby True HD or DTS Master HD, along with lossy audio tracks encoded at 640Kbps (Dolby Digital Plus) or DTS (1.5Mbps).

Saying blu-ray is only "marginally" better than DVD is just silly.

I don't know a single person buying Blu-Ray just because it's "better" than the unlocked DVD players they have now.

Then you don't know the right people, because twice as many people own blu-ray players now as those who owned DVD players when it was 3.5 years old.

 

[sohelpme]

But wouldn't Apple still have to open up the necessary APIs to get Flash to work properly (without using too many system resources, I mean)?

I'd be interested to see what others think about your idea.

Um, yes, those Adobe engineers would have to work with Apple engineers to hook it into WebKit and with the OS/hardware engineers to get hardware video decoding working [and those hardware engineers may have to add extra hardware to do this].

I would bet Adobe has offered something along these lines to Apple to get Flash on the original iPhone.

Apple doesn't want it on their mobile devices, so it's kind of a moot point. And I'm fine with it not being on them.

 

[Sternhammer]

It's ridiculous they'd launch a modern product like this without one of the core technologies *everyone* uses. No way are people going to get by without diskette drive in their computer. Apple is arrogantly expecting people to just stop using diskettes? And, what? use those expensive USB memory things or a computer network to share files? What a joke. That iMac will never sell.

 

[WilliamLondon]

Ok, so you bought an apple TV... now I understand completely. Good luck with your new i-rag... it will satisfy you as mush as your apple TV, if not more

I wish my standards were as low... then I would have actually believed this oversized ipod touch was "magical" and would have been much happier...

When your position is nonsense, ad hominems do the trick every time. Keep it up and continue to demonstrate nothing regarding intelligence.

BTW, you don't get to judge whether my purchases are enjoyed and valued, I do, thankyouverymuch. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay for my purchases, then I'm happy to let you buy them and tell you how much I like them. But you may find that I lie about how great they are just to get you to pay for them.<grin>

 

[SFStateStudent]

Flash or no Flash, like the iPhone, the iPad will sell....

 

[Frazzle]

Yeah, but 99% of pages that use Flash use them for ads. No, thanks.

And ad companies are no crybabies, they just go with the flow. I've noticed that they simply do an on-the-fly switch to animated GIFs. There's your ad for ya! Sigh...

 

[clochard42]

Is the whole IT-world now getting crazy?

Apple didn't even officially told us that there won't be flash on the iPad and still there are literally thousands of comments on various sits regarding this topic. Good trick doing a market analysis.

If any other well known company - HP, Dell, Acer, you name it - would release a computer that doesn't support flash, we would have a few comments "how stupid" on it and people just wouldn't buy the product.

Everybody posting comments here against Apple silently agrees on that Apple has the power to bring down even a de facto standard like flash that's being installed on 99% of all internet capable computers today (it's a proprietary standard owned by Adobe and not a web standard, can we finally agree on this). Why has Apple such a power? Because enough people will buy the iPad even without flash support and web designers and publishers will follow. Some with enthusiasm, some reluctant, some with anger.

And it's not Apple alone. Call it conspiracy: WHATWG, the driving force behind HTML5, started with individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software being unhappy with W3C and the slow development of web standards, spread over to their companies (and to Google - the editor of the WHATWG specifications, Ian Hickson, has moved to Google) and finally convinced the W3C of (or should I say infected with) HTML5 as well. Googles web applications don't use flash. Youtube started testing a HTML5 video player without flash, Vimeo followed.

Apple is acting as whipping boy on that topic and I'm sure Steve actually enjoys it to be "ahead of times". If Apple (Steve) wants to bring down flash, we can't prevent it - only if we can prevent millions of iPhones, iPods and soon iPads being sold.

Actually, what's so bad about giving up flash?

iPad will be available in two months. Some web sites will be "iPad conform" by that time (NY Times, Google, Youtube, and other usual suspects I expect), others later others never.

Well, buy an iPad or don't buy it, or buy it later.

One final comment. Again: Steve or Apple never said that flash isn't supported on the iPad. But he deliberately started the discussion about flash by deliberately displaying a web-page showing the famous blue brick. The backdoor has been left open allowing to innocently announce at some point of time, that flash support just didn't made it in time for the presentation but will be included in the final product of course. To get back to the Thread's title: By correcting the iPad Promo Video, Apple closed the door. Seems that our discussions here went exactly as expected.

 

[macUser2007]

...
b) doesn't advance the state of the internet at all. Flash was necessary 5 years ago to deliver video and highly interactive sites to internet clients. Today, between HTML5, AJAX/Javascript tools/libraries, and even native web clients [native Apps that use web sites as storage, ie, the cloud], present better ways for clients to interact. And don't forget, all those Flash sites need to be re-developed for the iPad anyway [if it supported Flash], because they all are designed for desktop mouse/keyboard interaction, not multitouch interaction.
c) increases engineering costs and per-unit costs and reduces battery life, as Apple has to include additional hardware video decoding chips just so that Adobe's Flash-lite code can run on mobile CPU's.....

Total nonsense.

Flash is here to stay, for the foreseeable future. Flash works well for the vast majority of web users.

The iPhone was marketed as a phone and player primarily. The iPad is marketed as a web browsing device.

But, the iPad will be crippled as a web device without Flash. EVERY major site has at least some Flash.

As I said before, only an idiot would buy the iPad as a web tablet, if aware of the lack of Flash support. Basically, the same 3 people who bought AppleTV....

 

[Amnak]

It's ridiculous they'd launch a modern product like this without one of the core technologies *everyone* uses. No way are people going to get by without diskette drive in their computer. Apple is arrogantly expecting people to just stop using diskettes? And, what? use those expensive USB memory things or a computer network to share files? What a joke. That iMac will never sell.

I hope your being sarcastic.

Can some one explain why blue ray players are not on the new Macs. In a dumbed down way. I don't really understand what everyones talking about ,i thought SJ was a supporter of BRay.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

This all raises the question of what, if any, good Flash content is there out there that couldn't be done as well or better with HTML, Javascript, etc...?

That's not the only question along these lines. There are lots of tools that make it possible for people who don't code in Flash and/or Flash Actionscript to be able to create interactive, multimedia, narrated presentations... especially in the education market. A lot of great tools are available on the Mac platform.

So, even though an answer to your question is that a lot of what can be done in Flash could also be done in HTML5, javascript and H.264, a lot of the people that produce non-ad Flash content will need the tools they use to produce that content also adapted to export HTML5, javascript and H.264 output. Or they need to hire talent capable in HTML5 and javascript to try to convert something they can do themselves with such tools.

A good example is referenced up above. Articulate is a program that converts Power Point presentations into streaming narrated Flash presentations (not plain Flash videos). Here's some examples to check out (not on your iPhone or iPod Touch because Apple forbids you from being able to do so): http://www.articulate.com/community/showcase/ You don't have to know a bit about Flash to produce really great educational presentations. Interactions you build into Power Point "such as an option to click a button to jump to another segment in the presentation" will work in the Flash playback. You can build a quiz in their Quizmaker program without ever touching Flash or Flash actionscript, import it into your Power Point presentation, and then render the whole thing, and you end up with a Flash educational lesson with a highly interactive quiz... never having to touch a Flash timeline, actionscipt, etc. It plays back in a big window and it streams each slide so even a slow internet connection can enjoy the full experience (unlike H.264 video which requires very small windows- and probably lots of buffering- for slower internet connections).

Now sure Articulate might work on their render engine to eventually offer the option of exporting HTML5, javascript and H.264 video, but then you'll need some programming talent to actually put those pieces together within your website. And, of course today we still have the problem of HTML5 not being well supported across even the major browsers, so while you might get it to look good on one, it might not look good or even work right on another. Flash on the other hand generally yields what the Flash author- or Articulate Education Lesson creator- intended on just about any browser and on any platform.

There are thousands of educational lessons created this way, playable on any computer that can run Flash. No Flash or web programmer required- just good Power Point skills, and good educational concepts... playable on just about any browser on any platform EXCEPT iPhone, iPod Touch, and (probably) iPad. Why? Because Apple chooses that owners of those devices shall not have Flash... not because they can't work with Flash... nor because it would make them more expensive to include Flash... etc... just because Apple has decided NOT to include it.

"Too bad Johnny, you can't tap into all this educational content with your iPad," says Steve "...tell those teachers, trainers, etc to redo all their educational content in HTML5, javascript and H.264. Then tell them to find the budget to hire programmers to be able to link HTML 5, javascript and H.264 together on their educational web sites" Is that really the best way to go?

 

[WilliamLondon]

Free TV on the ATV...

Can you elaborate?

FlashTV to hack the ATV is what I use currently.

It's the one *big* issue I have with Apple and the one big issue I'll have with the iPad, though it won't stop me from buying an iPad. (The issue being the inability to play non .H264 videos.)

 

[mlblacy]

wrong...

This is the problem with ipad. More so than ever you are stuck in Apple's world....but we still will always be at the whim of Apple in terms of what content we can consume...Want to download mp3s from the Amazon store instead of iTunes? Tough....

Really you aren't stuck in Apple's "world", feel free to leave at anytime. I have no problems purchasing songs off Amazon, and they import easily into iTunes. Want to import some of your DVDs and watch them on your iPod? There's an app for that, lol.

Just because you don't KNOW how to do it, doesn't mean the problem is with Apple. Perhaps it's with you...

I really don't get the undercurrent of resentment against Apple by so many of you. I think if I felt that strongly I wouldn't be spending my dollars with them, yet so many of you do (or complain about why you won't). Talk about conflicted.

 

[Eidorian]

FlashTV to hack the ATV is what I use currently.

It's the one *big* issue I have with Apple and the one big issue I'll have with the iPad, though it won't stop me from buying an iPad. (The issue being the inability to play non .H264 videos.)

Can you link me to the specific Flash TV you use? I'm not sure which one it is right now. I know it's for the Apple TV but I want to make sure to respond correctly.

Otherwise happy hacking of Apple hardware.

Hulu and my Windows Media Center work fine here for free.

 

[MatLu]

WHY does EVERY thread turn into a Flash/NO Flash discussion ?

Because this news article is about Flash capability, maybe? LOL.

 

[WilliamLondon]

ATVFlash, not FlashTV

Can you link me to the specific Flash TV you use? I'm not sure which one it is right now. I know it's for the Apple TV but I want to make sure to respond correctly.

Otherwise happy hacking of Apple hardware.

Hulu and my Windows Media Center work fine here for free.

ATVFlash. I manually hacked it at first by cracking the case, but this option is much better since you can load it on a USB stick and it just works. I got rid of my cable 2 years ago and haven't missed it at all.

 

[Sternhammer]

I hope your being sarcastic.

Yes. My point is that Apple has pushed technological change against the trend lots of times before and quite often it pays off for them. I'm happy to see Flash diminish—I rarely use it myself, relying on ClickToFlash.

 

[thecartoonguy]

WHY does EVERY thread turn into a Flash/NO Flash discussion ?

Get over it. Don't buy it.Scheesch.

+1

 

[Frazzle]

Thanks to ClickToFlash, this is what I see...

 

[Lokany]

Understandably understood

It's almost as if Apple purposely gives the competition gifts like leaving out a camera and Flash. They can however afford to do this, knowing people like me wont be happy but will still dish out the cash.

 

[MacTheSpoon]

Aw man, this is embarrassing. Why didn't you just make Mac OSX Touch, Apple!?

 

[Rocketman]

I was over on the Supersite to learn more about Windows Home Server when I remembered hearing about this.

Well crap. I think I'll be getting a Windows Home Server with a dual tuner, network PVR, and Time Machine backup support. Did we give up hope on the OS X Home Server?

I am afraid so. Steve is declining on home hardware and servers and up on remote cloud everything. He wants to sell you your next Mac, a media server capable device, as an instance on a server farm. The price approximates a Mac-Mini and the profit margin is about double. Apple is all about profit margins to improve sales growth thus stock price. Just like with a mac-Mini you have to bring your own display and keyboard. Enter iPad.

So you may well need to ALSO own a Windows based Media Server and if you are somewhere with crippled bandwidth, it may become your primary option.

See? No fanboi here! But no matter what, you will view your 1080p HD and 1080p 3D and 4028p 4K movies from a file not a plastic disc. Probably store-forward to RAMDISC.

Rocketman

 

[King Mook Mook]

Aw man, this is embarrassing. Why didn't you just make Mac OSX Touch, Apple!?

Don't we all wish it! When I saw the iPad announced I thought okay this is the consumer device. Next Steve will come out and say "This is for most of you in the audience. But now I have a product for the rest of you out there. Announcing the iPad Pro." And this would have full OS X and iPhone OS and have everything the iPad had but with OS X too (I know this would require different hardware and iPhone OS would need to be emulated but who cares). This could be starting a $999! And if they really wanted too they could have both the iPad internals for iPhone OS and some Intel internals for OS X and as the main cost of the iPad is the screen the internals are presumably quite cheap and then all they need is the screen and the Intel internals. Even if it started at $1199, it would still have a big market.

 

[boncellis]

Aw man, this is embarrassing. Why didn't you just make Mac OSX Touch, Apple!?

Just wait until somebody hacks the MSI 10" tablet (also ~$500 MSRP) with OS X! Should be interesting.

 

[moppsy]

The iPhone was marketed as a phone and player primarily.

I think the statements from those actually marketing the device speak more truthfully than thou.

"An iPod, a phone, and an ..."