Steve Jobs Explains iPad’s Lack of Flash Support

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Yes, I know, you guys already know that Steve Jobs & Co. do not appreciate Flash on their devices including the iPhone and, more importantly, the iPad which is all about a fabulous Internet experience. But why is Apple so against Flash? Is Flash bad for you? Is HTML5 going to come and sweep us of our feet instantly?

Steve Jobs apparently explained the lack of Flash in their upcoming iPad tablet at the WSJ while he was demoing the device. Naturally the guys from Wall Street Journal employ Flash a lot to animate their website so it will be weird for their regular readers not to be able to access some of that content on the iPad. Apple’s CEO is said to have been quite clear about Flash and what it does to the iPad.

Apparently Adobe’s software is a “CPU hog”, a source of “security holes” and an “old technology” that needs to be replaced. Maybe I’ll have to tell you yet again how HTML5 is not exactly around the corner coming to save our websites and the animations they contain. So in the mean time we’d love to still use Flash on our computers no matter how flawed it is. And I am sure Adobe would have some sort of response for Apple. After all, last time I checked Adobe was still working on improving Flash.

Moving back to Steve Jobs’ explanations it looks like the main reason for ditching Flash is battery performance. According to Jobs the battery life would go from 10 hours down to 1.5 hours if the CPU would be busy with Flash. Well what if we could test that for ourselves? But that won’t happen anytime soon, would it?

Therefore it will be interesting to see how well the iPad really does perform and how will various newspapers and magazine adapt their content to be fully accessible on Apple’s tablet. Unfortunately it will take a while until everyone moves to the aforementioned HTML5 and we’re probably going to see quite a few Flashless iPad versions until that happens.

Picture from Gawker.com