True, but I think Apple, with their very good legal team, could find some technical claim to use which Adobe would not be able to prove wrong...even battery life
It might not be that easy, they are dealing with regulators not the court and if they claim that the batter life is the justification then regulators might ask them to prove that 1/ Flash is such a drain on the battery, 2/ Apple made every effort to support Adobe in order to optimize Flash Player for iPhone and iPad prior to complain about performances, 3/ that the claim still holds true today. And there is also the leverage FTC and EU Commission have in term of public image, a formal full blown investigation could hurt the stock and would not be good at all for Apple.
Let me elaborate on the issues with flash player on desktops I experience...using a fully loaded MBP 15" (max processor, memory, graphics, fastest HD) and google chrome, at least once a day and sometimes several times daily flash player will crash, leaving spots on webpages that have flash ads or video completely transparent...as in, the square where the video would normally be is a square that seems to be cut out of the window, revealing the desktop (or other application) behind it. I am also using flash block, so flashplayer is only being used when I specifically "request" it, its not as if there are lots of flash ads and videos playing without my knowledge. I will admit that I have yet to have this problem in IE9 on my desktop PC, but I rarely use it (once a week at most I'd say, at least for internet)
That's an interesting case because out of all the browsers Chrome should provide the best experience with Flash, even though the integration is still new and was still in beta last year but I know for fact that Google's and Adobe's engineers worked real hard together to make it work knowing that Apple will be waiting at the corner.
I personally ran all version of Flash Player since 8 on Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and MacBook Pro, I never had any performance issue except on my Mac, working on Flash stuff all day was making the unit really overheat to the point it would burn my finger. I stopped having any problem with Flash whatsoever, including my new generation MacBook, since about a year or two.
Have you tried to uninstall all Flash Players, uninstall Chrome, make sure to install the latest version of Chrome (beta channel is pretty reliable, I never had problems with it and it saves me some bug headaches, the developer channel might be a bit pushy but I did enjoy it, it was super Chrome being super fast for the first time)?
Although I don't doubt your claim that Apple didn't supply adobe with a prerelease version of the MacBook air, I think calling it "underpowered" when, for what it is, it is far from underpowered really weakens your argument as a whole. You seem very clearly anti-apple, and it makes me wonder if your support for adobe is genuine or if you are only doing it to take the side apple isn't.
If I was anti Apple I would not work on a MacBook and carry an iPhone, even though I feel betrayed and will switch to Android as soon as a reliable alternative shows up (I want a solid phone, not a piece of plastic). The MacBook Air is underpowered, it's very small and we wonder where the power comes from or where the battery is, I did not make that up, I thought it was common knowledge, did I miss something?
Maybe it has hurt sales - maybe Apple would have sold billions of iPhones if they had Flash?
We will never know how many people bought an Android to avoid dealing with the Flash issue.
You're right though, it hasn't hurt sales. I do think a lot of people would like Flash, but it's obvious the strength of Apple's platform far outweighs that lack; and other technologies have filled much of the gap left by Flash's absence.
If I am right it did hurt the sell, or I am wrong and it did not, you have to pick one =;o) I think it is all depending on what else is on the shelve. I do not believe most of Apple's consumers to be fans or even loving Apple more than the product and I do not believe the masses will pull with the increasingly obvious abuse from Apple. The company has the right to do it but I believe it would be not reasonable to say Flash did not play any role in Android's success.
From a personal perspective (a developer working mostly in Flash at the moment, moving more to non-Flash options) - HTML & CSS & Javascript is not a nice development environment for RIAs. I'm sure it's great for relatively simple layouts, but not for complex, dynamic projects; IME.
It is close to impossible to develop a large RIA using HTML5 and Javascript, just the nature of the language, no OOP, no real concept of design patterns or best practices, it's literally amateurism and when it is not it cost multiple times more money to produce in HTML5 than in Flash. Just the tool, I mean look at Flash Builder and then go develop for iPhone, that's a cold shower!
- Developing for Flash, we tend to see very few cross-platform issues; as it's essentially the same plugin on each platform. Moving to HTML5, we'll be dealing with different implementations on each browser. Ideally they should be identical, in practice that's rarely the case.
That alone is enough for me to endorse Flash because I remember spending sometime up to 50% of my time dealing with cross browser and cross platform issues, I save my clients 100% of that overhead with Flash since I actually never even test my application on other browsers or OS until the end because I know the chances of discrepancy is close to 0. That alone means saving 25% to 50% of the total development budget.
- All the nastiness that's Flash accused of (intrusive adverts, hogging the CPU) is possible, and likely in HTML5/Javascript, given time. The one plus is taking the plugin out of the equation.
Finally some sense. There is no doubt that whoever does not like Flash ads will hate HTML5 ads, there is no doubt that when HTML5 will be pushed to the limit it will be as much of a resource drain as non optimized Flash was (I have actually seen 10.2 outperform HTML5 in many use cases involving video, 3D, complex rendering, frame-rate etc).
You are correct about that. I guess my point was that if everyone knew and cared as much as he though they did, the numbers wouldn't be going up. He keeps saying that the lack of Flash is going to hurt sales, and so far the numbers haven't proven that.
Well it only went up 0.7% between 2009 and 2010, I would not really call that "going up" when Android shown 888% increase in 2010 from the year before, way more spectacular that any iPhone performance to date. I know, it is unfair because Apple only 1 device blablabla but the bottom line is you do not know more than I do how many customers Apple lost to Android over the Flash issue. All I know is that a lot of people are not happy about it and the fact they pull with it does not mean everyone does.
Once again you are talking out of both sides. You say this year is the first one where competition is ready, yet you showed numbers detailing Android's growth in 2010. A year in which the iPhone 4 still outsold the 3GS from the previous year.
Doing good with sales and being ready for market showdown is two different things, Adobe and its partners which are pretty much the whole industry minus Apple, were still working on optimization a few months ago, a lot of products had their release date pushed to insure a proper Flash implementation (where Adobe certifies the device or Flash implementation, something like that), it was far from being a process as perfect and flawless as Apple's market entrances but it turned out pretty good. It is only now in 2011 that we are going to see the real impact of 2010 sales performances.
Most people don't know are care about Flash. And the iPhones sales numbers prove that.
No, I do not believe they do at all. Apple could have lost 10% market share over Flash and the numbers would still look the same: 0.7% market share increase between 2009 and 2010. Now, let's see how the iPhone 5 does and how good Apple is doing compared to last year... we will know in a matter of months.
The 20 million includes installations on phone sold prior to the middle of the year.
Where do you get that from? Where exactly do you see Flash installations on phone sold prior to its release?
Who knows. According to you, Adobe only expects 200 million by 2012. That will be about 50% of the annual market.
50% based on what number?
Super. Are all content types required to be supported in order to say a device supports the "full web." Because, if so, you won't find a computer on the planet that supports the "full web". Or is popularity the working definition? Or how about we go by W3C standards? Different definitions of the same term. None of them "lies."
W3C standards or outdated before to even see the light, I wish you good luck keeping up with Flash by sticking to W3C, their bureaucracy has been the worst enemy of the evolution of the web since day 1 and it is being carried on with HTML5 now.
Actually, the do. It's called copyright. You don't have a right to modify Apple's software without Apple's permission, except as permitted in the limitations to Apple's exclusive rights.
It is not because they can that they may, consumers do not give a damn about copyrights, they will decide based on what it delivers and what it does not deliver. Only Apple is pushing that kind of crap and I doubt they are not losing share over it but we can keep going for days.
And it's amazing that you think that you have the right to force them to have plugin support in their browser simply because you want it. Talk about abusing someone rights!
I never heard of a platform refraining me from installing a software that we know works on that platform. Give me examples of a company deciding out of the blue that they will refrain, not just remove from factory default, but refrain a competitive technology to be installed?
And the Flash Player hardly competes with the App Store considering most Flash content is free.
That is not true, most of the money with digital entertainment is monetized though Flash today with crumbles left to Microsoft Silverlight.
Seriously? Where do you get these numbers from? Do you just pick a number at random that sounds like it supports your argument? 0.4%? In what world does that make sense to you? You even posted a table with the actual sales estimates. Apple went from 25.1 million iPhones in 2009 to 47.5 million in 2010. That's 89% growth. Not 0.4%.
I am talking about market share and in points, in both cases Apple gained a fraction of a percent market share between:
2.1% market share in 2009, 2.9% in 2010 for all mobile devices.
14.4% market share in 2009, 15.7% in 2010 for smart phones.
I do not care much about how many units Apple sale or how much many they make, all I worry about is whether or not they have enough market share to manipulate competition. It was the case, it is no more so now it is really about the choice, that choice you denied the user the right to have on his iPhone or iPad. Now, let's see how long Apple is going to keep it up. I think they will break open on the iPad but that's just me.
why do you feel the need to engorge figures to try and fool people into believing your point? The iPhone is not, never has been, and almost certainly never will be $1000.
Without upgrade or new contract it is not unusual at all to end up with a $1000 bill once you get the accessories and MobileMe and the extra care and the case and you know, all the stuff. If you end up paying only $200 or $300 does not mean the true value is $1000 because if it was not $1000 then maybe it would be free, like most phones are and like most smart phones will become within the next 2 years.
- Flex, Apple has every right to not put Flash on their devices.
From a court point of view yes, but it is up to the consumer to grant or not that right to Apple. As a consumer, I could say that as far as I am concerned Apple has no right or should I say no legitimate purpose to refrain me from installing Flash. At the end consumers buy products, not lawyers.
