Steve Jobs: Flash video not suitable for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs: Flash video not suitable for iPhone

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19 pointschengmi10 comments

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Jobs quote about Flash lite not being "up to par" with the iPhone is pretty much BS too.. The latest Flash Lite 3 is actually very robust and would cover just about all that is needed for a great iPhone + flash implementation.

I agree the real reasons for not doing so are based on ulterior motives. Apple is greedy and doesnt want Adobe playing in their walled garden.

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.

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.

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

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.

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