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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

But reading, browsing, and writing is probably what most people spend their time doing on a computer.

"Transcode video formats while sitting in a cafe" doesn't exactly have the same ring.

Sure, but video chatting is getting to be pretty popular as well (which, at least on the previous Air, tended to bring the processor to its knees).

And browsing can be a pretty CPU heavy thing, these days. Not on the scale of video encoding, but enough to bring an ARM or Atom processor to its knees.

Not when you stop shipping flash with the OS.

MBAs have OSX, which I can't imagine is going to be losing Flash any time soon.

shipping with flash... http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/21/new-macbook-air-shipping-with...

There may be a surprise coming your way.

See the link[1] and thread[2] about Flash-less MBAs.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/20/macbook-air-all-substance...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814713

Well it doesn't come with Windows 7 by default either. It's just one of those things that everyone has to install whenever they reinstall windows. I also don't believe it comes with snow leopard either -- maybe the only change was remove the option of installing 3rd party plugins in Safari.

Did they also disable JavaScript?

Pages with heavy Javascript can cause issues too. For example, open up a large reddit thread on a netbook and wait. However, I don't know whether the MBA's processor will be better enough to handle that.

And not shipping with Flash doesn't mean Flash is now useless. Plenty of video sites out there haven't switched to HTML5, not to mention product sites or Flash game sites.

Oh who cares, really. It just forces the user to go out and download the latest version if they really want Flash, which means Apple won't take the blame for buyers getting machines with outdated security-compromised versions of Flash.

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