Jobs Says Flash Video Not Suitable for iPhone

Lev13than writes "Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said the iPhone won't be using Adobe Systems' Inc.'s popular Flash media player any time soon, saying the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video. Jobs said the version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone while the mobile version of the media player is "is not capable of being used with the web." The comments come a day before Apple is set to introduce the company's plan for iPhone SDK, the software developers kit which will allow third-party developers to create applications that can work in conjunction with the popular handheld device."

Comments

Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad.

Re:Another way of saying that

[LiquidCoooled]

Why is this a troll, its exactly what the problem is.
My n810 runs flash - badly - its advertised as working which it does but it drops frames with current implimentation.

iPhone/Apple users expect more and currently it can't be handled.

Re:Another way of saying that

[cheater512]

Thats *exactly* the problem.

Hell my oldish Pentium 4 starts coughing with some flash ads and videos.
What chance does a little iPhone have?

Re:Another way of saying that

[QuantumG]

Ignoring for now that you're not only a troll but also off-topic, and an AC, I'm going to reply and say that I don't even know what window manager I'm using. It's the makers of my distro chose for me. If I don't like it I can go dig for a replacement, but frankly I'm quite happy with it. Does this mean it was pointless having all those different window managers out there? No. Because I am not the only person on Earth.. my choice, or absence of one, is not the only one that counts. Besides, someone made a choice of what window manager to ship to me.. and they had a choice of many window managers to decide from. As I'm typically happy with their choices, it seems that having a choice of window managers is working out for me, even if I couldn't be bothered making it myself.

Now back in your box.

Re:Another way of saying that

[linzeal]

Flash video is stopgap. Why won't adobe realize that?

Re:Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment would hold some more water if OS X had a descent window magager, which it doesn't. Can you even shade a window? Are you going to point me to some binary hacker program now?

Re:Another way of saying that

[Stooshie]

... How about a choice of 1 window manager that actually works? ...

Which one works? Your definition of "works" may be different from mine. My gran's definition of works is "it's easy to send texts and it's big enough that I don't drop it". Yours may be "I can play any type of video". Mine may be "I really just need access to the internet to check emails and online bank account details when I'm not near a computer". All of these require different attitudes / standards / capabilities / skillsets / choices from the development / marketeting / engineering bods at apple / ms / nokia / adobe....

All these requirements are not neccessarily mutually exclusive, but when you bring price into the equation, thats when these choices have to be made.

Re:Another way of saying that

[jellomizer]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible. Many companies get so caught up in giving the most features and end up making a product that using most of the features are clumsy or to much of a pain to use. The iPhone isn't perfect but I actually use it more then my laptop because it has the features that I really need 75% of the time.

Re:Another way of saying that

[dwater]

I'm the same. Ever since I got my Nokia E90 I've never found it necessary to use my (Apple) laptop. The E90 has pretty much everything I need. I can certainly find cause to criticise it, but it's pretty much there and is a good laptop replacement for trips/etc.

The E90 has 3G, GPS, wifi, quickoffice and adobe pdf, a 3.2M pixel camera that does video as well as stills, a real web browser (using it now), and a real qwerty keyboard (in addition to the regular phone one). There're also plenty of 3rd party apps I can install (including my own) such as one that plays the flash video from youtube -and plays it just fine too.
It's quite an old device now (pre-dates the iPhone - Apple's that is), but it's still quite functional. Certainly not a sexy though.

Re:Another way of saying that

[PopeRatzo]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.

I guess this all depends on who is defining "best", huh?

Funny, Apple used to be about "choice", and it's only when their shit doesn't work that suddenly it's all about "best experience possible".

Up is down.

Re:Another way of saying that

[strabes]

"Nokia is fully content with shipping unfinished products and Apple is not." This is clearly not the reason Jobs gave for not shipping with flash support: "the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video." So Jobs says that there is something wrong with FLASH because it won't run properly on HIS company's device. Sounds like an excuse to me. Could you provide an example of a WM that doesn't "work" in linux? Have you ever even installed linux on that mac of yours?

Re:Another way of saying that

[that this is not und]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.

This kind of symantic slippery is typical Apple marketing buzz.

What's the standard deviation on that 75% figure you quoted? Did you just drag it out of your imagination?

Steve Jobs does his best marketing to psuedo-intellectuals and the undereducated intelligent.

Re:Another way of saying that

[davetv]

funny! .... agreed

Re:Another way of saying that

[elrous0]

more about giving them the best experience possible

I guess that explains why they went with AT&T.

Re:Another way of saying that

[mblase]

the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad.

My five-year-old 533MHz PowerMac isn't powerful enough to run Flash properly, either. It used to be, back in versions 7 and 8. Then when Flash v.9 hit the web and I foolishly immediately upgraded, all of a sudden I'm dog-slow visiting websites with full-screen Flash animations and stuttering YouTube videos. Adobe didn't even leave v.8 online for me to downgrade, either.

If Flash is too processor-intensive for the iPhone, that's just Apple's way of saying something everyone with a more-than-three-year-old computer has been saying all along.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Amouth]

to be honest in my aread (south east US) Cingular was the best service posiable (except when in the middle of no where of the woods) AT&T bought them and while the customer service has sence fallen down to the 6-7th layer of hell .. the cell service and coverage is quite nice. better than Alltel by an order of magnitude.

i have no issues with AT&T's service.. the 3G is really nice.. edge is slow as hell and the voice quality is good..

and their rates for data are reasonable.. i pay 40$ a month for unlimited data on my phone which includes using BT to teather my laptop. and when i have 3G signle the data transfer rate to the phone is about the same as my RR cable conenction at home and on the laptop it is only limited by the fact that my phone doesn't have BT with EDR. over all no complaints and i would do it again.

although i do find it funny that the bill i get lists out ALL the data transfer sessions.. so some times my bill looks like a textbook.. they need to learn not to kill so many trees

Re:Another way of saying that

[mweather]

"How about a choice of 1 window manager that actually works?" No such thing has been invented yet.

Re:Another way of saying that

[bsane]

Funny, Apple used to be about "choice" Uh... when has Apple been about choice in that sense? They've always been the 'choice' if you don't want to run MS, but once you've chosen Apple, you have to hope Apple provides what you need because you have fewer choices.

Mac user since '85- and I don't remember it ever being different.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Khuffie]

Here you go

Re:Another way of saying that

[kalirion]

Setting aside the horsepower, what use is flash video with a connection speed of @10KB/s?

Re:Another way of saying that

[Simon80]

Regardless, the iPhone has a significantly faster ARM core than the N800 and N810, 50% faster at 624MHz. I think this is more of a strategic decision than a performance issue, Jobs is basically saying that "Apple knows best" about flash because he doesn't want to give business and market share to Adobe. I have no objection to this, let them duke it out, flash is a scourge to web standards _and_ browser usability, and I don't have any Apple products to worry about anyway.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Vexorian]

I know of 3 Linux window managers that really stand out and most distros come with one of them.

Whoever moded you insightful will get nightmares today.

Re:Another way of saying that

[LiquidCoooled]

I was under the impression that iphone had wifi connection available.
Additionally, not all flash is bandwidth intensive.
You have a local cache and things like games can work very well.

Re:Another way of saying that

[T-Bone-T]

It does have wifi, but wifi isn't everywhere.
Additionally, most flash is bandwidth intensive.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

I love that you misspelled semantic.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Midnight Thunder]

the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad.

A Pentium 4 with 2GB of memories isn't either in certain cases. There are certain sites that are so chock full of flash, and I am not even talking about adult sites either, that they can bring the computer to a crawl. You wonder what is going on and then experience directs you to another tab in your browser. Closing that tab, brings your computer back to normal. The iPhone is more limited in its resources so is going to suffer faster.

Half the problem with Flash is that they are mostly developed by people with more sense about good design (and even that is sometimes questionable), than good programming.

Having said all this does anyone know how memory and CPU compares in an iPhone with regards to a Wii, which does support Flash in Opera.

BTW I believe the iPhone does support SVG, so if you want vector graphics this is an option.

Re:Another way of saying that

[nine-times]

It's not quite "exactly what the problem is."

First, using that language implies that the iPhone is underpowered, when it'd be more true to say that Flash is a bloated resource-hog. Second, people who've researched the problem suggest that the iPhone *could* run flash, but it'd drain battery life and present other interface problems.

The major point here is that Flash just isn't an appropriate technology for mobile devices. If you want video, h264 will provide great quality/batter-consumption (relative to other video formats). I still question whether Flash is an appropriate technology for anything, but we can discuss that at another time.

Re:Another way of saying that

[ShinmaWa]

Funny, Apple used to be about "choice" Apple used to be about choice in the same way that Ford was: "You have your Model T in any color you like, so long as it's black."

Apple has never been about choice. You can run their operating system on any hardware you like, so long as they made it. You can sync your iPod with any software you like, so long as it's iTunes. You can use your iPhone with any carrier you like, so long as it's one the Apple chose for you.

Re:Another way of saying that

[PortHaven]

Well, in this case...Apple is neither providing choice nor the best experience.

Re:Another way of saying that

[PortHaven]

Um, you do realize the latest Flash Player supports h264 - right?

Further more, if you're just using Flash for ads and video, you haven't even touched on the power that is Flash.

Re:Another way of saying that

[ktappe]

more about giving them the best experience possible

I guess that explains why they went with AT&T.

That's a cheap shot. Apple went with Cingular (now AT&T) because they had no choice--all other major carriers told them to go pound sand when Apple insisted on controlling the user interface. So yes, it really WAS a case of bringing the best experience possible to the user that stuck us all with AT&T.

Re:Another way of saying that

[anothy]

exactly. Roughly Drafted wrote about this when the iPhone first came out. what Jobs is saying is certainly true - Flash is astoundingly bloated and would offer a bad experience on the iPhone - but the real reasons are strategic. that, and maybe a little bit of spite: Apple was burned by Adobe's cold reaction to OS X (prompting the acquisitions that lead to Final Cut Pro and friends).

Re:Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the other carriers told them to pound sand when Apple wanted such large kickbacks from the monthly service fees. Don't let facts get in the way of your opinion though.

Re:Another way of saying that

[nine-times]

Yes, the most recent version of Flash supports h264, but you can't count on people to actually have the most recent version of Flash Player, so I wouldn't recommend using it yet.

Additionally, wrapping your h264 in a Flash player doesn't really buy you anything on a mobile device. You're better off sending a normal h264 video to the device and letting that device decode the video in whichever method it's most optimized to do that.

Re:Another way of saying that

[666999]

You're missing the point.

H264 video decoding uses relatively little power.

Flash uses lots of power.

Using Flash to watch h264 on the iPhone/iPod Touch makes no sense at all when there's already native support built-in.

Flash is a huge resource hog, like it or not, whether it's on a brand new computer or a portable device. It really needs to be optimized a lot more if Adobe expects it to be used for mobile devices, and if they/Macromedia haven't optimized it in the last 10 years they're probably not going to do it now. Focusing on adding features/more codecs/more ActionScript is only hurting its case.

I liked the dazzle and power of Shockwave and Flash a few years back when I was making web sites with them, but soon realized that nobody could bookmark individual pages, they couldn't print properly, etc. and I began moving everything to standards-compliant setups instead. I much prefer being able to use things like awstats to find out what pages are the most popular, etc. and you just can't get that kind of clarity with Flash-based sites, which are seen as one big page to a crawler or statistics package. Just a couple of examples, there are dozens of reasons why Flash is the wrong choice for any web site.

Flash is a kludge. There are ways to do everything with standards-compliant tools.

You may think that Flash can do all kinds of whizzy things, but in reality it's used mainly for advertising and watching videos.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Dahamma]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.

I'd say it's more about giving users the experience Apple thinks they should have. It's clear that many of the decisions are not based on giving the user the best experience.

I remember many claims that Apple was not allowing users to pick any MP3 on the iPhone as a ringtone because of "asthetic reasons" (ie "not another stupid ringtone!"). I could almost support that - but then their defaults are HORRIBLE, and as soon as was ready they started selling songs as ringtones at a ridiculously profitable price on iTunes.

Don't pretend that Apple is somehow more driven by pleasing the customer and not their bottom line than any other company... not that doing that correctly won't result in some great products people want to buy - I have an iPhone...

Re:Another way of saying that

[jellomizer]

Well that is a factor too but there was the fact that they the companies had to do work on their end to get some features ready such as the Visual Voice Mail. So they wern't willing to Risk making an infrastructure on a no-name cell phone.

Re:Another way of saying that

[jellomizer]

Apple is about a choice as in you have a choice to use them or not. vs. Microsoft which is them or or else... If you have noticed Apple new products (non-macs) work with both Macs and Windows systems. iPhone. iPods, Apple TV, even software for the Macbook Air that remotly access a PC's drive will run on both systems. As well OS X install disk comes with windows drivers for XP and Vista, for the Mac Hardware. Vs. Microsoft products were if you have a non windows system you generally out of luck unless the Technology has been open standard for years...

Apple doesn't have much choice in terms of what you can do with the product, they usually target particular jobs and make sure it does thoes well. Why didn't apple include virtual screens until 10.5, Unix and Unix like systems had them for years? because they never were able to make it in a way that any user and deal with A little Icon Size box with little boxes isn't nearly as intuative as a full screen display of the windows properly shrunk down with anti-aliasing so they just look smaller vs. missing data, and allowed easy dragging and droping windows to different screens. Or why the current version of the iPhones doesn't have G3 because at the time it was designed the G3 Chip took to much power and sacrificed the iPhones job as a Phone and iPod (Long times of activity), While Edge is slow most locations allow a Wi-Fi to counteract that effect. People would be pissed with the iPhone if the battery bairly lasted a day.

Re:Another way of saying that

[OptimusPaul]

As a professional Flash developer I'd have to agree with much of this. Most Flash out there is developed my people with little real programing background. The numbers of competent developers is growing, and many agencies are seeing the need. I have also noticed in the past few iterations of the Flash Player there have been some serious issues with Memory management. My understanding of some of the issues with speed are because of how the player executes code in general. It's still stuck on the timeline per frame execution paradigm. Flash could be faster and better... and I hope someday it is, or something better comes along.

Re:Another way of saying that

[dgatwood]

Using Flash to watch h264 on the iPhone/iPod Touch makes no sense at all when there's already native support built-in.

One would assume that a flash implementation if written even semi-competently would leverage that built-in support and would perform about as well as the native implementation except for a slightly larger memory footprint from having to load the flash plug-in.

Frankly, except for YouTube, I can't think of any good reason to have flash. It's not that pages don't use flash---a few pages do---it's just that none of them are pages I'd be likely to view on my phone, as they are mostly websites for computer software companies. By not having flash, I don't have my precious battery life wasted by a bunch of useless flash-based advertisements that I didn't really want to see anyway. It would, however, be nice if YouTube would get around to getting everything reencoded. The last YouTube link somebody emailed me still pointed to a video that wasn't in H.264 yet. It would also be nice if embedded YouTube content on other people's pages would always work. Not sure what's involved there, but I suspect it could be done without flash. Maybe that has gotten better recently---I haven't seen a page with embedded YouTube content in a while.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Another way of saying that

[arminw]

.... what use is flash ....

mostly to put annoying, bouncing, jiggling and FLASHing ads on the screen for you to click on.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Chineseyes]

Actually Cingular bought ATT not the other way around http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/17/technology/cingular_att/

Re:Another way of saying that

[PortHaven]

a) No you can't count on anything...people might not even be online. That said, Flash Player 9 is already at about 95+% proliferation. And our company's stats pretty much agree with Adobe's published stats.

b) Depends...do you only want to display video? Or would you like to add interactive overlays for say a training tool?

Re:Another way of saying that

[Cairnarvon]

You never had a flash plugin installed back when you were still on dial-up? I know I did.
Teaches people patience, too.

Re:Another way of saying that

[PopeRatzo]

Apple doesn't have much choice in terms of what you can do with the product

That doesn't stop them from trying.

I admit I was wrong, and your comments have corrected me: Apple was never, ever about choice.

Re:Another way of saying that

[nxtw]

A stopgap for what?
Since Flash video became popular (thanks to YouTube), it's become the primary method of streaming video on the Internet.

Personally, I never had a whole lot of luck with streaming video on the Internet with a non-IE browser... until everyone started using Flash. Now I can watch video on platforms other than Windows or Mac OS as long as they have a Flash player.

The latest Flash also supports H264.

Interestingly, YouTube also streams video in a format that Windows Media Player supports if you go to the site with a Windows Mobile phone (in addition to the iPhone service).

Re:Another way of saying that

[Grail]

Flash is for more than just ads and video! You can also use t for time-wasting web site "intro pages", and stupid web site animation that could have been done better with CSS & ECMAScript (or better yet, left out entirely)?

Personally, I'd be much happier with a Flash-free world-wide web.

Re:Another way of saying that

[chasd]

If you read the blogs of the Flash developers, you will understand that a good deal of code in the Flash player is written in assembly to optimize performance. That assembly code is specific to i386, and in the specific format the that the Microsoft development toolchain uses. Thus it is not easily ported to Xcode or the Linux toolchain. That is why the performance of Flash is best on Windows running on i386. Porting that assembly to ARM is non-trivial, so is likely to not be done. I'll bet Adobe is more interested in Flash 10 and a 64-bit version of the Flash player than the relatively small number of iPhone users.

Spaz

Re:Another way of saying that

[linzeal]

Ever try to watch a streaming HD vid with Flash? It ain't pretty and I have an AMDx2 6400+ with 8 gigs of ram. However I can watch HD videos all day long on a 1700+ AMD so long as it is some sort of streaming AVI.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Simon80]

While waving your hands around trying to sound knowledgeable, you've shown that you aren't properly following the conversation. The N800 and N810 run Linux on an ARM core that runs at 400Mhz, and the OS they run comes with a working port of Flash, which is fast enough to watch flash videos, albeit with stutter sometimes.

Re:Another way of saying that

[nxtw]

Ever try to watch a streaming HD vid with Flash? It ain't pretty and I have an AMDx2 6400+ with 8 gigs of ram.

Somehow I suspect that Flash is not the problem, or the problem is specific to your configuration.

However I can watch HD videos all day long on a 1700+ AMD so long as it is some sort of streaming AVI.

AVI is a container for audio and video. Sure, you might be able to play 1280x720 MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP (more commonly known as DivX/XviD), but you'd probably have difficulty with 1920x1080 MPEG-4 AVC (also known as H.264 or MPEG-4 AVC).

Re:Another way of saying that

[nine-times]

One would assume that a flash implementation if written even semi-competently would leverage that built-in support and would perform about as well as the native implementation except for a slightly larger memory footprint from having to load the flash plug-in.

One would hope that to be the case, but I certainly wouldn't assume it.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Bitsy Boffin]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.

To an extent, but it's borne by giving the most homogenous experience possible.

Apple is all about "the one true way".

I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all, infact I fully support the ideal, removing complexity, removing choices, just give the user one (good, simple) way to do something, lose all the other ways to skin the proverbial. KISS.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you just need to upgrade to the next revision of the iPhone.

Re:Another way of saying that

[jellomizer]

of course they are in it for their bottom line. But their competive advantage is making products with better interface.

Re:Another way of saying that

[that this is not und]

That's right. Because gibbering about spelling is what makes a person an intellectual.

Re:Another way of saying that

[iamhassi]

"the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad."

How ironic that just yesterday it was revealed that Spore and Super Monkey ball was coming to iPhones and the author was questioning if the iPhone was on par with the Sony PSP by saying: "Does this bring the iPhone up to DS and PSP levels?". And here, just a day later, the iPhone can't play Flash video while the PSP easily plays Flash.

Guess this announcement answered that question: No, the iPhone is not a Sony PSP killer. Not even equals.

Re:Another way of saying that

[dollargonzo]

may I ask what any of these have to do with window managers?

Re:Another way of saying that

[PhotoGuy]

I send/receive email to and from my mac with POP/SMTP, an open and accepted standard, not via the horribly ugly and MS-centric IMAP.

I do remote desktops via VNC, an open standard.

X-Windows is part of the operating system (well, an included Add-on) which opens up access to a lot of Unix apps. Their dev tools (also included) have gcc and all the other standard goodies.

A lot of Unix source code compiles up just fine on it. The code that doesn't, usually doesn't require extensive tweaks to do so.

Yeah, it's only certified on their hardware (which happens to be some of the best around).

Somehow I don't feel constrained... It's my choice to buy their gear, and I really don't feel locked in once I do. All the code I write, all the apps I use, can generally be done on other operating systems if I chose. I really don't ever seeing myself choosing to. It's just a better solution.

Re:Another way of saying that

[StikyPad]

I can't say I've ever come across anything big enough that I can't drop it. On the contrary..

Re:Another way of saying that

[Stooshie]

ermmm... the whole article is about apple ipod not playing flash. The apple ipod has some kind of windows manager (sorry don't know the exact details). Not playing Flash means certain video sites (ie the most popular one) cant be used on the ipod. So, if you want to play any type of video the the ipods not for you.

Re:Another way of saying that

[Stooshie]

... I can't say I've ever come across anything big enough that I can't drop it. On the contrary ...

I may be wrong, but I suspect you're not a 70 year old lady with arthritis.

Not surprised

[nighty5]

Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.

It's not to say its Apple's fault, but I think Adobe is at fault and I think their position won't change in any time soon.

Re:Not surprised

[ncryptd]

It's much better on x86 -- it used to be absolutely horrid on the PowerPC platform. Given my past experience with Flash on non-x86 architectures, I'm not surprised that Flash on ARM isn't a high-performance solution.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Some fingers have been pointed at the Safari plugin API.

Re:Not surprised

[pizzach]

Reminds me that one of the important points on Flash 9 was improving performance on Linux and other platforms. Flash is a very CPU hungry plugin anyway, but everything helps.

Re:Not surprised

[jcr]

Smarter people have blamed the atrocious coding in Adobe's flash interpreter. There's no excuse for busy-wait loops.

-jcr

Re:Not surprised

[MrNemesis]

I think the same can be said for any OS that isn't win32.

Re:Not surprised

[TheRaven64]

I can't watch the Comedy Central flash clips on my 1.5GHz G4 without dropping frames. On my 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, the BBC iPlayer spikes my CPU to over 60%. In contrast, playing 720p brings it to about 30%. It also causes the fans to spin loudly and kills the battery.

Re:Not surprised

[ThaReetLad]

busy-wait loops? Really?!?! I find it hard to believe they'd do anything so crap, but then I guess it is adobe we're talking about. Proof?

Re:Not surprised

[beelsebob]

That makes sense, after all, quicktime does the same thing... Wait, no, actually it's really really fast (admitedly not as fast as playing it in VLC, but as fast as the standalone QT player) and doesn't drop frames even on large videos.

Re:Not surprised

[Oktober Sunset]

Macromedia made flash, Adobe just bought it. Adobe can be blamed for not fixing it, but Macromedia made it broken to start with.

Re:Not surprised

[ThePengwin]

Actually. Macromedia bought it too.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me fix that for you.

Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%. In addition in 2008 it still isn't available in 64-bit.

Re:Not surprised

[ceeam]

That's what we get when we embrace fucking proprietary formats. It's only as good as the single manufacturer cares for it. Being bitten by it time and again for several decades we still behave like Homer Simpson - "oh, shiny!".

crap...

Re:Not surprised

[Hal_Porter]

Is that just on Mac? On Windows it seems to be quite CPU efficient. IE uses about 13-20% of a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo playing a flash video, same with Opera. Mind you on a 1Ghz P3 I remember it was still CPU friendly so it must know how to scale itself to work on fast and slow machines. Probably the Mac port is less optimized, which is really what Steve Jobs is saying - optimize for OS X or we'll cut you out of the iPhone.

Mind you the iPhone only has GSM, so it's hard to imagine youtube working particularly well. Then again, youtube does work well on the iPod Touch last time I tried it over WiFi.

Re:Not surprised

[nmg196]

> so what the fuck is OSX's problem. according to the apple fanboi's it's the shit?

According to most Windows fanboys it *IS* shit.

Re:Not surprised

[Mr. Underbridge]

Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.

I'm not a "real" programmer, but it seems to me that effect might be related to how OSX on PowerPC also spikes when you hold the mouse button down. I think flash must monopolize the event loop in some similar way, which makes OSX (on PPC) barf while Windows doesn't as bad. If OSX on iPhone works in a similar way, that effect would indeed be a fatal flaw.

I do think it might be overly disingenious on Jobs' part to blame Adobe 100%, but anything that gets rid of these damned flash movies is OK in my book.

Re:Not surprised

[fermion]

Which is fine with me. Flash is a power hog, and only about 5% of the content is reasonable or necessary. I can live without it. In fact, the primary issue with the safari browser is that it cannot natively block flash, unlike recent versions of camino.

The day that iphone supports flash, and the flash cannot be disabled, is the day that the iphone becomes quite useless to anyone other than advertisers and pron watchers.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

They open sourced it, it's called tamarin, and is actually damn impressive. You can criticize a lot of things about adobe and flash, but the avm (tamarin) is not one of them.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, there are Windows fanboys?

Re:Not surprised

[Tragek]

Intel Mac: Watching a youtube video takes 50% CPU... on BOTH cores. Ridiculous. Watching 320x240 blocky video being that bad. You can blame .flv, but a flash ad on slashdot has been known to take more CPU.

Re:Not surprised

[mattgoldey]

I agree. Nothing bogs down my Mac mini like Flash.

Re:Not surprised

[elrous0]

Yes, but it's such *good looking* shit.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a Flash file out there that illustrates this, but OS X tries to render the animation as completely smooth. Windows, on the other hand, goes into choppy mode. Presumably the more perfectly rendered animation will use more CPU power. Of course it looks a whole lot better too.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that, for the first time, I agree with Jobs, makes me think.

However, not only on OS X. Windows itself suffers from the problems of flash. You can see the cycles of processor considerably rise when you open any flash based website. Although, same happens with the quicktime/itunes update check programs. Quicktime is a pain to open too and resource eating.

Internet developers should converge to a technology to display video that is not pushed only by MS (WMP), Apple (Quicktime) or Adobe (Flash). Despite of the versatility of flash, the resources required to run are just as appropriated as those of WMP or Quicktime.

Currently I use TCPMP as my default player on my cellphone and 700MB divx videos run smoothly even with a 200MHz processor, with no great battery penalty. I'm assuming that the fact that TCPMP doesn't hangs as WMP is part of some sort of optimization and such improves on the amount of cycles required, that translate in less power consumed. Now, can Adobe or someone else produce some media content delivery software that can be optimized for different applications? I'm sure that several animations shouldn't be as big as they result when they are in swf format.

Re:Not surprised

[mjwise]

Erm, what? I'm on an older G5 right now running an older version of OS X (10.3) and the CPU use doesn't spike doing that.

Re:Not surprised

[peragrin]

which I find odd as m intel Mac mini runs flash just fine.

Re:Not surprised

[mattgoldey]

I have a 1st generation 1.25GHz PPC Mac mini.

Re:Not surprised

[Mr. Underbridge]

Erm, what? I'm on an older G5 right now running an older version of OS X (10.3) and the CPU use doesn't spike doing that.

My experience is G4, can't say anything about the G5.

Re:Not surprised

[mzs]

tamarin is only the ActionScript virtual machine. That is a part of Flash, not the whole. The nice thing about it is that it is a Just In Time (JIT) VM. In Mozilla it will be used for the javascript.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Or people who really don't like Macs.

Re:Not surprised

[The End Of Days]

Yes, of course the problem is that Apple is too perfect.

I should have seen that answer coming.

Re:Not surprised

[SilentSheep]

...and WiFi(802.11g), ...and EDGE.

Re:Not surprised

[pressman]

Technically, Adobe didn't buy Macromedia. They merged.

Re:Not surprised

[smurfsurf]

AOL. Good thing I can block all the Flash ads. I tried without an ad blocker and could tell by the fan turning into a jet turbine on take-off that there is a Flash ad on the web page...

Re:Not surprised

[danwat1234]

I can't watch youtube videos in full-screen mode on my Dell D610 laptop (Pentium M Dothan 1.86GHz, 2GB RAN) without usually having to pause it in order for the CPU utilization to stop from being so high that the player won't be able to download the streaming video fast enough to keep up with the playback. Weird run-on sentence, no?

Re:Not surprised

[Skuld-Chan]

Back when I had a mac mini (ppc model - this was when they just came out) - I was sorely disappointed in its video performance overall - for instance I had a hard time playing quicktime clips back fluidly never mind flash.

I ended up getting rid of it for that very reason.

Re:Not surprised

[onefriedrice]

I think there's something wrong with your G4 if it can't handle Flash at 1.5GHz. My 2x800Mhz G4 handles Flash easily, and I doubt it's because of the dual processors. I agree that Flash is better on x86 (much less cpu strain), but I don't share your experience of "dropping frames" on my old G4.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the first things I learned about graphics design is leave the color palette to the pros. So yes, color is the same issue as Flash. In about 5% of the cases it significantly enhances the experiences, in about 50% of the cases it detracts, and the rest is a draw. Just because something is cheap and possible does not mean we should use it.

Re:Not surprised

[dgatwood]

Actually, it probably is the dual processors. Flash playback can only saturate one CPU, leaving the other one free to fetch data over the network. I'm not saying this couldn't be alleviated through careful thread scheduling, but a dual 800 will often outperform a single CPU at twice the speed when it comes to avoiding starvation.

Re:Not surprised

[clang_jangle]

My home desktop is a G4 eMac, 1.25 GHz with 1 GB RAM, running OS X Tiger and it plays flash perfectly. Most codecs perfectly in fact, except certain avi files -- not sure why, but I suspect some windows media player chicanery (because I've experienced that same "some avi files" problem in *nix).

Re:Not surprised

[jhesse]

Ok, I just ran 'top' on a Rev. D iMac (366MHz G3) running 10.2.8 and held down the mouse button.

No change in CPU.

Re:Not surprised

[IronChef]

Adobe distributes Flash for the Pocket PC. It's older, Flash 4 maybe? And it ain't super fast. But on my years old Axim PDA, which is I think a 400MHz ARM, I can play swf's like Magical Trevor.

Maybe the issue is more that Adobe/Apple can't easily provide compatibility with the current version of Flash. I'd rather have some than none though.

Re:Not surprised

[xenocide2]

It's not FLV. Grab a random youtube flv with youtube-dl, and try playing with VLC, mplayer, or whatever. At least on my Ubunut desktop, it runs exactly as you would expect: perfectly, with very little CPU usage. I conclude it's either the browser or flash itself.

I wonder if Java applets fare worse...

Re:Not surprised

[sfjoe]

Flash - A tag for today's modern world.

Re:Not surprised

[dgatwood]

Performance is a tricky thing. Any number of factors can affect it. The original poster didn't say how much RAM, nor what Mac OS X version. what Safari version, or what version of flash he/she had installed, so there could be any number of differences. Also, unless you are both looking at the same flash clips from the same source, you may not see the same behavior. Even things like network speed can have an impact.

For that matter, a faster network connection would have more data sitting there waiting for the networking thread in the flash plug-in, and if that thread only gets one time slice every thousand slices, being able to read twice as much data in that slice could easily make the difference between the player thread starving and not starving.

Dunno. Without seeing the system in question, all I can do is take wild guesses which will probably be wrong. The point was that two slower CPUs can be faster than a single CPU at twice the speed, depending on lots of factors, not that they necessarily always are.

Can't say that I disagree

[pembo13]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin. The same machines played media via the divx plugin without issue (at much better quality)

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[sqrt(2)]

Videos turn into a slideshow on my 2ghz Turion running Ubuntu. If you're not using a powerful processor on windows flash will suck for you. Which is probably why I see so much hate for adobe and flash around here since we have a lot of non-windows users on this site and the flash experience is terrible. Adobe needs to shape up and make the linux version work as good as the windows one.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[n3tcat]

No they don't. They are making a lot of money right now without those things you mention. They don't NEED to change anything. But it would be really, really swell if they did.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Riktov]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin.

Me, if the chicks are hot and the action's good, I get jerking regardless of format or buffering...

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[tacocat]

Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.

Information Delivery are websites where you are seeking some kind of information or news that you desire in your daily life. Examples of this are google, amazon, slashdot, ebay, bbc, csmonitor.com for most. This also includes sites for mysql, apache, postgresql, perl/cpan. These are all sites that, when you visit you often have a very specific purpose and end goal in mind.

Entertainment Delivery are sites that offer no hard end goal other than entertainment and can be represented by youtube, ask a ninja, webkinz, and other online game sites. On these sites, the web content is the entertainment and people would have more expectations of lots of flash load on their PC.

But there seems to be a lot of manufacturers and resale sites that are trying to do both at the same time and for most, they do an amazingly bad job without any real thought of delivering informational content about their products but just wowing the crap out of some board members. I tried to buy some Serengeti sunglasses because my experience has been that they are the best I've ever owned. But their website is one of the fattest and annoying places I've been to in years. And they don't even properly identify how to purchase their glasses. Had I been a marginal customer I would have walked a long time ago. In the past, I have walked from suppliers because their product catalog brought down my computer to a crawl and didn't do anything to provide me the information I needed.

Flash does not belong on Information Delivery websites.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hate to see what happens in the event of a buffer overflow...

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[SlashWombat]

FOSS VLC plays flash very necely ... perhaps Apple should try that.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[squiggleslash]

Chances are this has something to do with the X11 driver and the way Flash uses it, not Flash per-se. My Wii, which is a much poorer spec'd machine than your Pentium from the sounds of things, has no problems at all with Flash. Try the following:

1. Install MPlayer. Make sure you install the non-free plug-ins (the Windows DLLs and stuff.) Configure and test it to make sure it can play regular videos smoothly.
2. Go back to your webbrowser, and go to your favorite Flash video that "turns into a slideshow", and play the entire thing in your web browser (or, at least, wait for it to finish loading and hit the pause button)
3. With your web browser still open, open a terminal window, and type "mplayer -fs /tmp/Flash*"

The chances are that playback will be smooth as a baby's bottom. This, at least, is my experience on an 800MHz VIA C3 in my living room. "Slideshow" in the browser, "Smooth" when played with MPlayer. The problem isn't the Flash codec, it's something to do with the way Flash videos are pushed through the browser.

Now, my N800 with OS2008 does strain a little to play a Flash video perfectly smoothly, but on the other hand it's not a bad job and it's more than acceptable.

The CPU usage of Flash video isn't that great relatively speaking. It's just it's very easy to foul up playback.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[baldass_newbie]

Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.

This is eerily like my kindergarten-age child's description of books as being either non-fiction or fiction. If it provides information, she says, it's non-fiction. (Makes you wonder how you would classify sites for things like Entertainment tonight and TMZ. Okay, not really.)
But I'm with you. The web has folks trying to blur the lines and if information is not clearly presented, especially towards the stated purpose, then it's a nightmare.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[fruey]

Interesting theory, and makes sense since MPlayer will be configured to use the best available screen access library, whether that be direct framebuffer, or various other possibilities (I am not an expert).

Using the standalone flash player in Windows, or even a plugin for a viewer like IrfanView, works better than the flash plugin in a browser and I can think of several reasons because for the plugin:

- Rest of the screen handled by browser rendering, which is unlikely to use anything close to framebuffer / direct hardware access and very likely to use standard API calls to the window manager
- Requirement to have interactivity - clickable links, rollover actions, etc
- May require transparency with content underneath visible, so can't be done using an overlay
- Code covers vector graphics, etc which can be overlayed on video content too

So voilà, it's not just about the plugin being "bad", but that it has way less chance of using the most efficient video delivery method. MPlayer is just pulling out the FLV content, which is not the same as the SWF container + buffering code + FLV content sitting in a page which it may need to interact with and cover other issues.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[squiggleslash]

I think that would be true if it wasn't for the case that the Wii and Maemo versions are presumably from the same code base, and that even if they're not Flash playback on various other PCs I have (albeit all faster than the 800 VIA C3, but not necessarily as fast as the 2GHz Pentium mentioned by the GGP) is very smooth indeed.

I honestly think the issue is the interaction between the browser and the plug-in, not the efficiency of the plug-in's code. I don't think the plug-in "knows" how to efficiently access the screen.

From a "Can it work ok on iPhone" PoV, that's what matters. If the raw code Adobe has implemented can play flash smoothly on lower end hardware, then Jobs may be exaggerating the extent to which this is a problem with Flash's technology.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Gandalf360]

One of the problems though is that somehow (youtube) flash video became *the* way to do video on the internet. I'm part of a team trying to setup instructional information security videos on the 'net (http://theacademy.ca/)and the feedback that we got from the public at large was that "it has to look and act like youtube". If the iphone can't play those videos I can see lots of users being upset that they can't do something that they really want to do.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[binaryspiral]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video ...

Um, pr0n is supposed to have that...

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[kamome]

Also, let me add that my machine (1GHz) can hardly cope with any flash using firefox and the gnash-plugin (ubuntu). But! I can easily unplug a video (usually, e.g. youtube works) with the unplug extension and then play that same video with totem (not using any non-free codecs, w32 or whatever) without a glitch. So flash (especially once gnash gets better) doesn't suck that much but with the browser plugin it does.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Richard Fairhurst]

Utter rubbish.

Flash is one of many tools available for building Rich Internet Applications. AJAX-type technologies are another, Java a third. In some areas, such as vector drawing and image manipulation, Flash is the best choice: in some areas, it isn't. Hey, isn't it great that the web isn't just controlled by one company?

I'm the main developer of the online map editor for OpenStreetMap. It's written in Flash (a fairly old version, actually - ActionScript 1 compiled with the open-source Ming library). Flash hits just the right spot. Its penetration is very high. It's easy to develop for, because the implementation is almost entirely the same on the three main platforms - a big deal for a volunteer project with limited developers and users ever demanding more and more features. (There is one bug in the Linux player that doesn't show up on OS X or Windows. Other than that, the differences are entirely in Microsoft's brain-dead embed method for WinIE.) It's fast - yes, even on the fairly sluggish OS X player: the Java applet we had in the project's early days was much slower on Apple's JVM. And the results are visually appealing.

To sneerily dismiss Flash with a superior "does not belong on Proper Websites Like The Sort I Make" is like damning HTML because some people use the blink tag.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[mini me]

Why not offer H.264 encoded video to iPhone/iPod Touch users and Flash video to everyone else?

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Miamicanes]

> Videos turn into a slideshow on my 2ghz Turion running Ubuntu.

What video chipset do you have, and what driver are you using? I have a creaky old Dell D600 laptop with 1.6GHz Pentium M and Mobile Radeon (officially-obsolete 9000 series) that dual-boots BOTH Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) and Vista Ultimate, and can (usually) play flash videos just fine as long as I don't OFFICIALLY make it "full-screen". For some bizarre reason known only to ATI, I can play videos in a window maximized to fill the entire screen, but if I try to abolish the window entirely and give the whole display over to the window, it seems to forget about all of its onboard hardware DCT acceleration and exhibits the behavior you describe.

My recommendation: if you're using the open-source driver, try the proprietary binary one. If you're using the proprietary binary one, try the open-source driver. In either case, try viewing the video as both "full-screen" and in a maximized regular window... Four permutations, at least one of which will probably give you MUCH better results than you're currently seeing.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[matt me]

4. Rewire youtube so that the flash videos aren't played through flash client, but through video player browser plug-in of your choice (mplayer best). There exist greasemonkey scripts for this.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[value_added]

Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.

LOL. Pop Quiz Time.

Which of the following is most true:

a) Slashdot is an Information Delivery system.
b) Slashdot is an Entertainment Delivery system.
c) Slashdot is both.
d) Slashdot doesn't deliver.

Your reasoning appears fine, but I think it's too narrow to be of much use and then, it's flawed. Susan Sontag wrote an essay on the subject in an essay entitled On Style years ago. I'll offer an alternative.

I watch the Charlie Rose fairly regularly. I don't watch entertainment news, nor do I bother with news dressed up as entertainment. The main reason I enjoy the show is because it's informative, not because of it's style. The style of the show, two more people sitting in a darked studio around an oak table, however, is the reason it's informative.

So, for example, if a book is supposed to Information Delivery, how much information does it (or can it) convey without its cover and bindings and typography. What value is a documentary that's badly filmed? And a computer program or website with an unappealing, unattractive, or otherwise uninteresting interface? Typically, it doesn't get used as much as the one that does so it fails to deliver Information or Entertainment.

The point here is that while you can draw conclusions on edge cases and characterise one side as "information" and the other as "entertainment", you can never separate style from content. You can attribute this to a failing in human nature (people who have beards look more intelligent, attractive girls have warmer personalities, etc), but it's an integral part of the way we experience the world around us, real or virtual.

As for Flash, well, it mostly sucks, I wish it wasn't used, and tend to stay away from any sites that make use of it. I have, however, seen artists do amazing things with Flash, so much so that I wish everything I see on my computer screen would look and act the same way. And that's from someone whose uses a terminal for everything except general web browsing.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[PortHaven]

Flash is superb on information delivery systems. However, most people are only familiar with the Flash ads. Which are not made by programmers, and usually are designed to be very annoying.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Skuld-Chan]

You know what I find odd about this statement is that a) flash videos play just fine on my umpc (Tablet XP 900 mhz Celeron) and b) flash videos play fine on my solaris machine (Blade 1500 - I think its a 1.2 ghz Ultrasparc).

When you consider the memory footprint flash has, (about 2 megs) and that it has a vm - I think its much more optimized than some runtimes out there (java, .net etc)

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[jdevivre]

Ahhh! A Realist! Kudos.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[watzinaneihm]

then I think something is seriously wrong with your config.
I am running on Ubuntu (Gutsy 7.1) with flash player on both Netscape and Mozilla browsers. This is on a machine with an Intel Core2 Duo 1.66 Ghz. I can play more than one simultaneous video, fast forward as needed and even use the Desktop cube effect with 4 desktops with no problems at all. Only problem I have seen is that Flash (and hence the browser,usually Netscape) crashes when the website is slow to respond.
In fact I think Flash on Ubuntu works better with jumping around the segments of video better than the windows version.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[I_am_Jack]

Flash does not belong on Information Delivery websites.

No, but Adobe Flex does. Or at least can be a UI solution, depending on the mission.

I've got an iPod Touch, which I love, and it has a YouTube feature built in. Anyone know what they're using to present the video besides Flash, as I have access to every video on the site?

"performance standard"

[nguy]

That's a euphemism for "if we let Flash on the iPhone, we (Apple) don't completely control the video and content delivery on the iPhone anymore".

That's also the real reason Jobs has been so slow on the iPhone SDK: the last thing they want is other companies creating audio and video delivery apps for Apple's iPods and iPhones.

Re:"performance standard"

[deathtopaulw]

that makes no sense, the more video/audio capabilities a device has the more people are going to buy it

remember apple makes money on the hardware not the songs/vids from itunes

Re:"performance standard"

[strack]

Yeah but id bet they'd prefer to make money on both..

Re:"performance standard"

[ronin510]

Have you used the iPhone? I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.

Sure, there's the special YouTube application. What it basically does is link to h.264 converted videos, but as I said, any website can provide videos in that format. Having videos play via h.264 benefits iPhone users, and standards enthusiasts, actually. The iPhone has a dedicated h.264 chip to more efficiently decode such files. This is a much more energy efficient solution compared to decoding flash videos through software. So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.

Re:"performance standard"

[rainhill]

you are probably right, but one wanders why youtube works nicely on iphone

Re:"performance standard"

[vally_manea]

I'm not so sure about that anymore, I recently heard Itunes is the number 2 on-line music store: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/26/technology/itunes_walmart.ap/ just behind Walmart, they can't sell this much music and not make money. Not sure about the video part though.

Re:"performance standard"

[funfail]

So being number 2 store in a multi-billion dollar industry can be interpreted as not making money, right?

Re:"performance standard"

[bhtooefr]

Because the iPhone is downloading the H.264 vids direct from YouTube's site, rather than playing them in a flash-based player. ;)

Re:"performance standard"

[GauteL]

"I recently heard Itunes is the number 2 on-line music store: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/26/technology/itunes_walmart.ap/ just behind Walmart, they can't sell this much music and not make money."

Correction. According to the article you reference, they are the number 2 music retailer, full stop. The are the clear number one in the online market, they just also happen to be so big that they have surpassed all the traditional retailers except Wal-Mart.

Your conclusions are surely right, however. I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information. The iTunes store surely makes money on it's own at this stage.

Re:"performance standard"

[ubernostrum]

So being number 2 store in a multi-billion dollar industry can be interpreted as not making money, right?

Maybe, maybe not. Apple's net profit -- the amount of actual money they make -- depends on the cost of operating the iTunes store infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, personnel, etc.) and on the fees they pay to the record labels for access to the music catalogs. From what I can find after some quick Googling, it appears that Apple pays 70 cents to the labels for each 99-cent download, which means that in order to turn a profit it needs to cost less than 29 cents per song to run the store. It almost certainly does, and the actual numbers almost certainly represent serious money, but suddenly it's a bit more debatable as to whether iTunes is a major cash cow in and of itself, or whether it drives hardware sales while happily turning a profit of its own.

Re:"performance standard"

[erroneus]

I couldn't agree more. That's exactly the first thing I thought when I read this.

I have little doubt that Apple could make that device do just about anything they want it to do -- it's a really nice piece of hardware. But it's so clamped down that everything about it says "we didn't do it because we don't want you to do it." I once tried to do something as simple as "send a text email then try to copy and paste the information into the address book" only to find there was no way to do that. C'mon! Apple practically invented copy and paste! (I know, they did not.) The same certainly applies to uploading pictures via email and the like. I can't imagine these disabilities (that do not exist in my pathetic blackberry) are anything but lock-down that Apple/AT&T simply doesn't want you to have. It seems at every turn Apple locked the device down to prevent as much 3rd party activity as possible including the inevitable 3rd party market for batteries. (It's a phone! Replacement batteries are required! In fact, the inability to pull the battery is actually a huge security concern!)

Apple will either have to admit colossal failure of the iPhone (just as they did with Newton and others) or they'll have to deliver on user expectations and "get over themselves." Their tight control mentality has kept them from growing beyond specific limits and I have little doubt that this is the case now.

Re:"performance standard"

[GaryPatterson]

That's so true, except for the bit about complete control. I think the iPhone does most video content and web content, but hey, apparently every website on Earth without Adobe's Flash is under Apple's control.

Someone better tell those YouTube guys they're working for Apple. It's the sort of thing they should know.

Re:"performance standard"

[lbft]

If it's grunty enough to handle H.264, why the hell would it have any problem with Flash?

Re:"performance standard"

[larry bagina]

Look at teh number of online music stores that have failed -- Napster (2.0), Walmart, that MTV one, buy.com, and more. Those were all properly financed and they found out there's no room for profit. The only people making money are MS (by licensing PlaysForSure), the RIAA, and Apple (but only on the hardware).

Re:"performance standard"

[__aaqvdr516]

[quote]that makes no sense, the more video/audio capabilities a device has the more people are going to buy it[/quote] That's true, unless you're Apple. The Ipod was inferior to many other players (in both formats played and screen quality) yet it still out sold them. Apple is all about control. They're probably trying to leverage their position to give a kick to QT.

Re:"performance standard"

[iainl]

It's because they have specific hardware acceleration for H.264, just like all other iPods. They don't have that for generic Flash, and the general ARM CPU isn't good enough to use the current interpreter.

Re:"performance standard"

[Threni]

They could always have supported 3G on the iPhone - then perhaps it would be fast enough. There was a 3G outage on my phone network the other day (TMobile in the UK), and the only way I could get online on my phone was to temporarily disable 3G. It sucked.

Re:"performance standard"

[maxume]

Their annual report, available here:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-reports

doesn't break out their income by product group, but it does list $2.5 billion in sales for "Other music related products and services", and I don't see any complaints about costs in operating it, so they are probably at least breaking even.

It could still be a loss leader of sorts, in the sense that it could have much lower margins than their other operations, which would dilute any measure that relies on total operations. This can have a negative impact on stock valuation(setting aside whether it should, the point is it can). So if they have to do $1 of 10% profitable iTunes business for every $1 of 20% profitable iPod business, from the outside, you see $2 of 15% profitable business. As problems go, not a bad one to have, but some investors think it is better to split those sorts of operations off.

Re:"performance standard"

[goombah99]

So they sell almost as much music as walmart and they only pull in 2 billion?

Re:"performance standard"

[duffbeer703]

iTMS is selling commodities at fixed margins. So they make money, but not at the margins that Apple is used to.

Re:"performance standard"

[Tronster]

that makes no sense, the more video/audio capabilities a device has the more people are going to buy it

I think there are several examples to show this not to be true.
Example: What was the market outcome of Nintendo's Gameboy (4 levels of gray) when it was competing with the Atari's Lynx, Sega's Gamegear, as well as a few others?

Now whether or not the grandparent's theory is correct is a matter of speculation, but I wouldn't discount it.

Re:"performance standard"

[illectro]

Exactly, if you can go to imeem.com and listen to any piece of music using your iPhone then suddenly the 'streaming only' limitation of imeem doesn't seem like such a restriction, which in turn means less of those all important 'buy from itunes' clicks.

Re:"performance standard"

[nguy]

I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.

You're missing the point entirely. Whether the iPhone can browse YouTube or whether you can listen to some free podcasts isn't all that important. What matters to Apple is whether they control commercial for-pay content delivery. If they let companies write applications for the iPhone, they lose that control. If they commit to having Flash on the iPhone, they lose that control as well.

So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.

Flash and other players can take advantage of H.264 decoding hardware.

And trying to argue that for Apple to decide what goes on your iPhone or not is good for you is just plain stupid.

Re:"performance standard"

[nine-times]

I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information.

I think it's likely that the information is not a myth, but outdated. There were a few reputable news sources who, years ago, analyzed Apple's business model for iTunes and determined that they weren't likely to be making much profit, if any at all, from the store. However, those calculations probably included some things like setting up the store and paying for bandwidth, bla bla bla.

Flash forward a few years, and the store is already set up, bandwidth prices have gone down a bit, and they're moving a lot more volume. Even though hardware/bandwidth demands will scale with the volume, more volume often means more profit (for a variety of reasons).

I would bet they're making decent money from iTunes, but still not an outrageous amount of money. That's part of the reason there's so much friction between the media companies and Apple, that the media companies view their industry as something that should be making outrageous amounts of money, and Apple tried to drive prices down to a modest level and use music/movies as a marketing tool to sell something else.

Re:"performance standard"

[maxume]

The article doesn't say that they sell almost as much music as Walmart. It says that they sell more music than Target and Best Buy(individually) and that they sell less music than Walmart. There is only a #2 in there, not an almost #1.

I looked around to see how much music business Walmart does and I didn't find anything that explicitly reported it.

Re:"performance standard"

[uniquename72]

Walmart music store has failed? Enlighten us with your source, please.

cf. the N800/810

[DingerX]

...which has Flash 9 fully implemented.

It works, and you can watch video with it, and with OS2008 it isn't half bad. But Flash is either on or off, and some abuses of flash can really slow down your web experience (e.g., try loading page full of flash video ads).

So, yes, you can get Flash on a mobile device (the n800 has an Arm9 @400 MHz, while the iPhone's processor runs at 620), but not a 100% reliable effort-free flash. Also, considering the iPhone's screen resolution, Flash would really suck on it.

Re:cf. the N800/810

[Yokaze]

> the iPhone's processor runs at 620

The iPhone's arm11 runs at 412MHz (before firmware 1.1.2 at 400MHz). Theoretically, it could run with 620MHz, but it doesn't.

Re:cf. the N800/810

[SparafucileMan]

This is exactly why all they need to do at the start is let you turn on Flash files individually. By default it is off and if you want to see a file you just click on it. If it is lacking functionality--so what, just build that in later. In the meantime getting some glimpse of a file is better than the stupid X on the screen.

Sitting around and demanding that it is all or nothing is not a technical decision--it's just a ploy on Apple's part to keep Adobe from becoming more of a standard and competing with YouTube, iTunes, etc., for as long as possible.

Re:cf. the N800/810

[FamineMonk]

The N800 only gets a bump up to 400mhz after you install OS2008 and OS2007 still plays flash well enough for me. On youtube you just have to let the video finish downloading before you try to play it.

I think with OS2007 the CPU is set to 340-360 somewhere around there.

Re:cf. the N800/810

[cbhacking]

You REALLY need to install AdBlock Plus on the N8x0. It's incredible how much difference it makes. Pages load faster, you can have more pages open (less RAM wasted), see more on the screen, less risk of accidentally clicking a link while scrolling, and (most relevant to the conversation) don't waste massive amounts of CPU rendering Flash ads.

Link: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/news/5/ Visit it in the n8x0 and you can download the .install file directly. otherwise, the relevant repository is
Catalog name: Browser Extras
Web Address: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/browser-extras
Components: browser-extras

Probably requires the chinook distribution (OS2008) but I'm not sure.

If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[Tweaker_Phreaker]

It's amazing that Steve Jobs criticized flash's performance on PC's when quicktime has long had the slowest decoding on PC's for any format it can play. I think he may be threatened that flash is going to become the defacto player for h.264 on the web.

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[RalphSleigh]

There's no going to become about it. It is.

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[TheRaven64]

Decoding H.264 at 720p via QuickTime uses about half as much CPU on my machine as playing back iPlayer video (which is less than SD, and has noticeable artefacts).

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[ansa]

PC != windows

Quicktime on MacOSX works very well indeed... it kinda sucks on linux tough.

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[moosesocks]

It sucks a lot less that Windows Media Player does on the Mac (which isn't even officially supported any more!)

And on the Mac, QuickTime isn't all that bad. As a base set of libraries, it provides an extremely valuable function to the operating system, by allowing any application to easily access the full suite of audio/video functions provided by Quicktime. iMovie and FinalCut do virtually no video processing of their own, and are effectively just fancy front-ends to the quicktime libraries.

Performance isn't phenomenally great (I believe VLC uses a few percent less CPU for some formats, although it's nothing all that remarkable), but it certainly isn't bad.

On the PC, Quicktime is a good bit worse than VLC, but is still very much usable (unlike the ill-fated Windows Media Player for mac).

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[unfunk]

On the PC, Quicktime is a good bit worse than VLC, but is still very much usable (unlike the ill-fated Windows Media Player for mac). I think not... Quicktime on Windows ranks only slightly below RealPlayer in the "most annoyingly bad media players" charts... I seriously think that Microsoft and Apple should have some sort of covenant where they agree not to write software for each others platforms, and to fully support the other's stuff in their own products. Like have iTMS working in WMP, and... whatever the MS equivalent is working in iTunes/Safari.

For a company that has such great hardware and OS, they sure don't don't make it seem all that appealing, judging from the core software's Windows versions...

Re:If flash is slow then what is quicktime?

[amsr]

I hear this from time to time, but what do you mean by "slowest decoding"? Last time I checked, all of the major editing apps use quicktime to author, and FWIW quicktime (using modern codecs, not the 1990 stuff) plays video very seamlessly. Even on Windows, playing an mpeg4 video in Quicktime vs. WMP, there is a huge difference. WMP skips more, and you can't accurately scrub using WM.

Makes sense

[427_ci_505]

Running on a late 2003 vintage amd64, Flash video spikes processor usage in linux (debian-64, with wrappers to make it work). The same computer plays much higher quality divx using a much smaller amount of resources just fine.

So mostly, flash just sucks for this purpose. But I doubt that is the only reason why Jobs says this.

Analysis

[DigitalisAkujin]

A lot of people will construe this as simply Apple trying to control media on the Iphone which although it does make sense that people would think this way, it's definitely not true.

Flash is optimized for windows. It has no where near the right optimization to run on OSX at full speed. Further compounding the issue is that the CPU must do all the decoding work where on a proper player the decoding could partially be offloaded to a GPU (in a full PC), or optimized CPU with support for certain optimized instruction sets.

Re:Analysis

[dunkelfalke]

bullshit.
there is flash for windows mobile, palm (sony clie) and symbian os (a list of supported handsets). those devices have much weaker cpus than the iphone.

Re:Analysis

[bhtooefr]

That's Flash Lite, the mobile version of Flash that Jobs was referring to.

It, in a nutshell, is worthless.

Re:Analysis

[stewbacca]

Flash is optimized for windows. I keep seeing this, yet I don't buy it. Source, anyone? Apple and Macromedia were long time bedfellows, and Adobe is so deeply ingrained in the lowest level of MacOSX, it isn't even funny. I develop Flash stuff on cutting edge Core2duo workstations, and the output is no better than the stuff I do on my Core2duo iMac at home. One thing is true, Flash (CS3) is much more stable on my home Mac than it is my work computers. Purely anecdotal perhaps, but Flash crashes at least once a day on any one of my four XP workstations, yet in 15 months, it has yet to crash on OSX.

Re:Analysis

[sarhjinian]

Flash is a client-side technology. Most flash consumers use Windows and/or Intel CPUs. On a Mac OS X or Linux and/or PPC machine with equivalent power, Flash will run slower because it hasn't been worth the effort on Macromedia/Adobe's part to spend resources on smaller slices of the market.

Now, you can make arguments for the performance being partially the result of Mac OS or Linux's imaging system, but other (not all--a number are still optimized for x86) video codecs don't suffer as much.

youtube, anyone?

[markybob]

youtube uses flash video, and as most people know, you can view youtube videos on the iphone. so how does this make sense? it seems like jobs is saying the iphone wont support what it already supports. i dont get it

Re:youtube, anyone?

[Zelos]

IIRC, the iPhone plays Youtube videos converted to H264 using a native client, not Flash video.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[DigitalisAkujin]

They probably have an alternative means to an end..... YouTube can deliver the video in a different format.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[raynet]

Youtube when used with a "standard" browser uses flash video, when you use it with iPhone it probably uses something else, eg. embeds MP4-videos directly on the page or something, maybe iPhone has FLV (flash video format) player, but it doesnt have Flash-player. Flash is more than just a video player on a browser.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[AceJohnny]

Flash video (flv) is a container around codecs, like AVI, OGG, and even MPEG is. The codec typically used in Flash is by On2, I believe. I guess Jobs is complaining about Adobe's mobile implementation of the decoder.

However, Adobe recently added support for H.264 in Flash. H.264 is more widespread and there are hardware-accelerated implementations for it in the mobile field. Youtube has started supporting that codec as well (add &fmt=6 at the end of video URL to try, if that video has been converted)

Hell, I worked on a mobile chip which includes MPEG4 and H264 encode/decode acceleration, which has been included in a recently announced Nokia smartphone, and I can confirm that On2 aren't accelerated (and Microsoft's VC1, used in DVB-H, is only partly accelerated), and thus have to run on the ARM core, at the expense of higher power consumption.

Translation:

[nacule]

As we don't have the time or resources to spare, we are going to convince all iPhone users that this is something that wont contribute in any way to their $500 "new-age multimedia-rich internet browsing" experience.

Re:Jobs is so full of shit ...

[gmon750]

Apparently enough people listen to him instead of listening to whiners like you. And yet the iPhone is a success after only eight months? iPod? MacBooks? iMac? I'm sorry... what were you saying? Not important anyways... you can go back to your parent's basement now.

Suits Me

[AndrewStephens]

Lets face it, Flash is used for four things:

Video: Flash video is becoming the dominant video delivery mechanism for the web, its only competition is Quicktime. Perhaps flash video does take large amounts of processing power to decode (the Wii certainly doesn't do a very good job), but I suspect that Apple doesn't care too much if people find a reason not to serve video content in flash rather than quicktime.

Ads and sneaky cookie storage: Flash ads are annoying, and rather worryingly Flash programs can store rather large amounts of data in a sort of large cookie on your computer. This is often used to identify a user even if they have disabled cookies. Good riddance.

Games: it is a shame that flash games will never work on the iPhone, but this is somewhat understandable. The iPhone does not have keyboard and the pointing device works in a very different way to a mouse. Most games would not work well without recoding them for the iPhone and battery life would be bad since the screen would be continually updating.

Apps: well actually there are only a handful of sites I know of the actually use flash for something that couldn't be done in HTML. Mobile Safari is actually one of the more capable browsers out there, even compared to desktop browsers.

Additionally, while I don't doubt there are technical reasons for the decision, Adobe and Apple have always had a love/hate relationship - there may be political reasons why Apple wants to shut Flash out.

Re:Suits Me

[Anonymous Coward]

...its only competition is Quicktime. I honestly can't remember the last time I've seen a .mov file on the web. It's usually Flash, followed by .avi, .wmv, .mpg, then finally .mov.

Are you looking at a different web?

Re:Suits Me

[batman14]

One shot promotion and special offer websites : On the commercial side, you forgot all the web designers usage that have to choose flash to "sexify" their websites with animations and so on. Several brands like Coca cola use flash to make their promotion website. Luxuary industry : Most part of the most expensive websites of hotels and restaurants use flash as their primary plateform of promotion. Cartoonists and design : Flash built its reputation on this, and still used in animation center to produce professional cartoons. (we worked with some studios last year on that). Nothing to do with the web though. I will add that you forgot to talk about professional and non public practices of flash. Charting : One of the most important usage of flash nowadays in finance and stock market business : charting. Look at your google analytics account and you will see one good sample of it. Of course you can do it in HTML, but here flash provides good tools to do it. Video conferencing : you can stream/broadcast web cam and mic signals with flash. Really efficient and that's the future of flash via cocomo API. 3d : Another point of flash is 3d. VRML/x3d sucks big time compared to flash. It is used for instance by train workers here in France that use tablet pc with a browser embedding flash 3d models of the electrical boxes to discover on the field how to fix it. Real-time tracking : And last and not least, pseudo real time process. Because Flash supports server push and rtmp protocol, it makes it a really nice option, if not the only one, to have collaborative and shared workspace. Financial apps rely on flash to track market changes. In these examples, flash is the only alternative that provide these functions on a web architecture. And I can tell you that my flex/flash background is really really valuable in my curriculum vitae on the job market.

Re:Suits Me

[GFPerez]

Shared Objects (the Flash "cookies" are easily limited via Flash's settings panel (adn the default is 100KB), so your information is not very accurate. Although iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and ponting device, that's no reason to limit the possible creativity that game developers may come with to figure other fun games with other methods of control, ie. http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/02/interview_the_next_big_puzzle.php But I agree with the rest of your post.

Re:Suits Me

[tgd]

Actually you missed one other group: splash screens.

For good or bad, a LOT of restaurants I've noticed have them, and often have no way to get past them if you don't have flash. For most sites, if that happens I'll just go somewhere else but it drives me nuts when I'm trying to get a menu or address for a restaurant.

Also, lack of Pandora sucks. I hope Pandora at some point realizes they've got a potential big iPhone market and does either a native client or a web-only client.

Re:Suits Me

[stewbacca]

You missed probably the largest use of Flash outside of dorking around on the 'net. Training, rapid E-learning, tutorials, etc. are one of the main reasons we put up with Flash at all.

Re:Suits Me

[sootman]

Excellent summary. I had come to most of the same conclusions as you but I will use your comment as a template for any future arguments I make. :-) I would like to add one more thing: screen size. Especially for games, the screen size is a big limitation--most Flash games are authored at a size much larger than the iPhone's native resolution of 320x480, and for a game more than anything, the iPhone's pan-and-zoom navigation system would not work. (Plus the keyboard, which most games need, would take up even more of the screen, and is hard to use accurately and quickly, which would again make games unplayable.)

So if it can't be played on a small screen, and it can't be played by panning around... it can't be played.

Re:Suits Me

[PortHaven]

Why not a game like Tetris, where you can spin the blocks and use a multi-touch gesture to push into place?

Or a FPS, where you have a button spot for firing, and move the screen around with your fingers?

Re:Suits Me

[AndrewStephens]

Cool ideas, but nothing like this exists in Flash at the moment, and if you are thinking of creating these games specifically for the iPhone you would use the just-announced SDK. Does Flash even have support for multitouch? My guess is that it does not.

Flash would be useful for showing existing content already developed on the web, but as I said in my original post, there are several reasons why it may not be a good match for the iPhone.

Re:Suits Me

[sootman]

GAMES, in general, will work just fine, no doubt about it. EXISTING FLASH GAMES, on the other hand, absolutely won't.

I could care less about flash movies...

[TFer_Atvar]

But far too many websites use flash for their entry portals, and don't have a non-flash alternative. It really, really sucks when I can't get to a website I need to use on my phone. This announcement seems to be to be an invitation to crack my as yet unbroken phone, and make me some kind of "pirate."

Re:I could care less about flash movies...

[AndrewStephens]

But far too many websites use flash for their entry portals, and don't have a non-flash alternative

True, but I bet those entry portals would work poorly even on a Flash supporting iPhone. Flash doesn't have a way to scale to smaller screens like (well written) HTML. Can anyone tell us how flash works on other mobile devices? Does the reduced real-estate cause problems, or does it work well in practice?

Re:I could care less about flash movies...

[twoshortplanks]

Flash doesn't have a way to scale to smaller screens

You are aware that Flash is a vector based graphics format, right?

Re:I could care less about flash movies...

[Overzeetop]

Flash sucks on WM6, or rather isn't installed by default, so my Hermes doesn't do flash. At least two companies which have a flash-only front page has lost my business in the past because of it. One of them has fixed the oversight, but I still won't shop there anymore.

Re:I could care less about flash movies...

[Zelos]

If you scale a Flash interface designed for a 1280x1024 screen down to an iphone screen will the text be legible? Will the user be able to press the buttons/menus etc? Just scaling the interface so it's the right number of pixels across isn't enough.

Re:I could care less about flash movies...

[PortHaven]

Yeah...sucks when you encounter an AJAX site that doesn't let you thru too.

Life in a RIA Web World...

Flash Video is a huge CPU hog

[Dwedit]

Flash is a huge, huge CPU hog for playing videos. It is also not the only way to play flash videos.
I have done comparative performance tests.
In one corner: Youtube's flash-based player
In the other corner: Windows Media Player + Gabest's FLV Splitter + FFDSHOW.
When playing the same flash video, Flash took 40% CPU usage, and Windows Media Player took 5% CPU usage.
This just shows that Flash Player is extremely inefficient. Its performance gets much worse when showing a video in full screen.

Re:Flash Video is a huge CPU hog

[AaronLawrence]

I guess that the particular Flash video decoder is inefficient. The rest of Flash might be OK.
But in fact, being all vector graphics I assume that Flash uses lots of floating point internally, and that goes badly on mobile devices.

Flash video is LCD video

[gordguide]

I'm not trying to defend Steve or even Apple. Bill and Microsoft have to share some of the blame, and I'm pulling out the stops and sending Real, Inc straight to hell. The short answer is the video wars are tiring, and consumers are simply tired of playing. No, I mean it.

Real is pure evil proto-spyware. Quicktime and Windows Media have fought it out for ... lets see here ... more than a decade? Can that be right? You bet it can.

So, the default Lowest-Common-Denominator format is Flash.

This-Is-Not-News.

It works, period. Quality? Not really there, actually. No, don't flame me. It's is truly a LCD format, a decade after video-on-the-desktop became a reality for both software and hardware. You could watch a decent quality 240x320 video in 1995. That, ultimately, is a very sad thing to say out loud, because this is 2008.

Flash is really not that great. Quality is frankly pathetic. I think that's what Steve was getting at.

But ...

You can view it on pretty much every computer today. Flash 1; QuickTime/WMV/Real 0.
It's widely supported on the web itself; every browser plays it when the page embeds it. Flash 1; Quicktime/WMV/Real 0.
It's not so great quality wise, but content providers WANT acceptable-but-not-one-pixel-more quality. Flash 1; Quicktime/WMV/Real 0.

What Steve, who you have to admit has this thing about quality, dislikes about Flash is the cheezy quality of the videos. I don't blame him nor can I say he is wrong. They are most certainly slow to load, CPU intensive, choppy/blocky/blurry things. But they work.

Steve wants video that looks good and works. I can't say he's wrong. Flash is weak in that area more than others.

So, let's put it into perspective here. Everyone talks about Blue-Ray vs DVD-HD but the real format war is still ongoing, and arguably less worth fighting over.

Can't we agree on a web video standard, where the codecs are built into every OS, consume reasonable resources, has some measure of copy protection ** and are viewable on everyone's OS, including the fringe OS's like Linux (which would not be a fringe if someone was selling it ... market share is more than just market share)?

I have my favorites. Don't get me wrong here. But, the video wars are too long with no winner in sight. I agree that Flash is not the ideal format, it's not even as good as at least 2 out of the three alternatives. But, Adobe has a vested interest in getting rich off of every OS out there, by controlling the creation of content, not the rest of the stuff. Apple, MIcrosoft and Real all had that goal in mind back in the early 90's; they've forgotten what they're fighting for now.

** Cheezy Quality = the modern day copy protection. Don't dismiss the value of it to content providers; they don't.

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[freedom_india]

Steve is lying and so are you.
I use an LG Viewty KU990 touchscreen phone based on Flash.
I use customized handset themes for it to make it act like fully 3D.
Nowhere did i find it slower than iPhone.

Flash is easier to do beautiful interactive elements. True.
Flash is awful for playing videos. True.

Flash as UI for phones. Great, because it is thin, light and simply works.

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[pizzach]

I was actually thinking mp4 would become the next baseline standard on the web, especially since it uses H.264 as the video codec by default. But until WMP actually includes support for it it will continue to just float around. Maybe Microsoft has been slow about it because it directly competes with wmv and doesn't lock people in?

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[Zelos]

I assume that's Flash Lite, which (as I understand it) is not the same as the general Flash you get on the internet. It's specifically designed and optimised for mobile applications.

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[risinganger]

You're assumption is correct. If freedom_india had bothered to do some research (s)he would have known that the KU990 runs off Flash Lite 2.1

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[Mr. Punch]

I think you hit on the iPhone issue when you say "What Steve, who you have to admit has this thing about quality...."

The key question is "would you rather do something poorly or not at all?" This is not a trivial design decision when you're making anything. No device can do everything well (especially when "be small" and "be cheap" are things you want it to do). I think it's clear from what we've seen so far about the iPhone that Apple would prefer to leave out a feature than do it poorly.

Based on the success of the iPhone and iPod, I think this strategy is working well for them.

Re:Flash video is LCD video

[Xiaran]

Flash also supports H.264. I work on an open source server side transcoder engine based on openlibraries... the demand is all for flash... I can transcode to just about anything you like... but all the punters want is flash :(

Re:Nice way of saying...

[beelsebob]

How on earth did this get modded insightful? I mean, sure, your '$600 toy' isn't as powerful as a laptop, but it does have a faster CPU than any PDA on the market!

As for not suitable for use on the web, I suspect that's SJ's polite version of "it's shite".

A: Because it disturbs the flow of a message

[DNS-and-BIND]

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line irritating?

Re:Nice way of saying...

[vertigoCiel]

...ie, your $600 toy has the CPU power of a TI-85. Enjoy playing text-mode Tetris on it, though... The iPhone is one of (if not the most) powerful smart phones on the market in terms of processing power. Or do you know of a smart phone that does support full Flash (not Flash Lite)? Extra points if the battery life is longer than ten minutes.

Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates). He's referring to Flash Lite, which is typically used to provide a UI layer for mobile devices. It doesn't even support the most recent version of Actionscript (which has been out for almost two years). The mere idea of navigating any modern Flash website with Flash Lite makes me cringe - which is what he meant by "not capable of being used with the web."

Once again, Master Steve turns the screws, and the fans will cry out, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" I do a fair amount of Flash development, and even I don't like the idea of Flash on my iPod Touch. If not having Flash on a mobile device is wrong, baby, I don't wanna be right.

Only Jobs...

[Xest]

Could twist "The iPhone is too slow for Flash" into "Flash is too slow for the iPhone".

What does that even mean? Flash wont play at 60 fps or something and that's the speed of video Jobs wants? I know what he means but in trying to dress it as a problem with Flash it stops making sense. It'd have been more correct to say something like "Flash is too resource intensive for the iPhone" but I guess if you put it in a form that makes sense it still makes the iPhone's hardware sound bad.

Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on Flash and wouldn't use it for general web development, but for streaming video, due to YouTube and the likes it's fast become a fairly standard way of displaying video, whilst I'd like to see Flash removed from the web long term, I think it's foolish to not support it short term as that currently only harms consumers. Develop a better alternative (Not Quicktime thanks, it's far, far worse) and support it alongside Flash and phase Flash out in favour of that alternative over time.

Re:Only Jobs...

[bhtooefr]

OK, realize that an iPhone that would be powerful enough to run Flash... would look more like this, and would [b]STILL[/b] be too slow - even if it were running it in IE on Windows, which is the fastest Flash Player:

http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/detail.do?group=computersperipherals&type=ultramobilepc&subtype=ultramobilepc&model_cd=NP-Q1U/000/SEA

Re:Only Jobs...

[Renderer of Evil]

The problem with flash isn't only the speed, but the way it would fit into the iPhone-style of browsing. With HTML pages you can pinch and zoom, do all kinds of weird things. My brain hurts when I try to imagine navigating a site that's built entirely with flash. Flash killed WMV and Real for web video (for which I am thankful), but it's equally bad in other areas like holding up accessible site development.

Re:Only Jobs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this 'twist' is exactly what any company with a PR manager who wanted to keep his job would do.

Re:Only Jobs...

[Urkki]

Can video be played by some other method than flash, and even at better quality? Well, yes. This kind of proves, that flash is both crappy quality and uses a lot more processing power (== electricty from limited batter, don't forget that!) than it should even with that crappy quality.

I'd say it's completely fair to blame flash video for being a POS, not iPhone (or any other battery-powered device) for lacking the power to overcome the POSiness of flash.

Re:Only Jobs...

[Anonymous Coward]

eh excuse me but you don't know what you're talking about -

its a well known fact that flash doesn't run well at all on apple computers, it pretty obvious that an iphone wouldn't fare any better.

what does amaze me is the attitude of apple and its bleating users.
this adds up to 'we've made a machine that isn't powerful enough to enable a ubiquitous web technology, we think that people should use a different web technology.'

once this becomes apparent to people that are thinking of buying an iphone then they will think different :)

most people i know who've bought them are sick of the cumbersome great bricks and are looking to sell.

Re:Only Jobs...

[bhtooefr]

To be fair, Flash is horribly slow.

I find it horribly slow on anything other than IE on Windows, given ANY hardware. Modern dual core processors, multiple gigabytes of RAM? Still slow.

Re:Only Jobs...

[anothy]

the iPhone runs an ARM processor above 400Mhz. there are plenty of video codecs for which that's plenty. that even used to be okay for Flash, most of a decade ago. these days, Flash is so inefficiently coded that the equivalent mips on a PC wouldn't cut it using the Windows Flash player, which is the most efficient of the set. given that, it's totally fair to blame poorly coded software for the failure.

Re:Only Jobs...

[nine-times]

Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.

I would quibble with this point. I can't think of any site in which Flash does anything *important*. I've seen situations where I understand why people use Flash, but in every case I can think of, Flash is expendable.

...but for streaming video, due to YouTube and the likes it's fast become a fairly standard way of displaying video...

Right, it's become a fairly standard way of *displaying* video embedded in webpages. Flash isn't chosen because it's a good/effective method of streaming video (FLV quality is pretty awful), but because it can be used to embed video in the page itself in an effective manner. However, when you go to a device as small as a cell phone, and you want to watch a video, there's a very good chance you'll want to watch that video full-screen. Once you're watching a video full-screen, the value of Flash for viewing videos complete evaporates.

So what would be a good standard for streaming, assuming you don't need to embed the video in a web page? In terms of quality at a given bitrate, and in terms of power consumption, h264 is a clear winner. h264 is supported by Quicktime and therefore the iPhone. And there you have it, what Apple is doing the sensible thing.

Bring on the Silverlight!

[Saint Gerbil]

Maybe MS has given them a bung to get their flash on it first ?

Good for almost everyone.

[Rocketship Underpant]

The lack of Flash could be a pretty good thing as Mobile Safari grows in usage, and web developers begin taking it into account. We could begin seeing real movie websites again, instead of annoying Flash sites; and Flash ads overall will decline so that advertisers lose out on potential clicks from iPhone and iPod users.

Re:Good for almost everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

no, if you think about he's right!

the lack of flash is a feature - just one of many on the feature-rich iPhone! are these types of new features being added all the time?

woh...that reality distortion field is making me feel a bit dizzy here...feckel feckel freezers.

friends of mine who bought an iphone all seem to be rather anxious to get rid of them. i'm beginning to see why.

It's the API, stupid ;-)

[Kifoth]

Has anyone seen Flash's Actionscript lately? AS3 is a respectable programming language (Flame away :P). Considering that Jobs never wanted an iPhone API at all, if he lets Flash on the iPhone, he'll be opening the door to a rival API that he has little control over.

Re:It's the API, stupid ;-)

[nine-times]

Maybe it's just that I'm not a programmer, but are you using "API" correctly? As far as I've heard, the iPhone has many of the APIs that OSX has, but they haven't released an SDK yet?

I mean, anyway, they're releasing an SDK, so if you're implying that Apple does want people to develop applications for the iPhone, it's pretty clear that you're wrong. Using Flash/Actionscript to code apps for the iPhone seems a bit silly to me anyway, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, so go ahead and correct me.

Re:It's the API, stupid ;-)

[PortHaven]

Actually, Flash/AS3 is one of the best tools for web apps. And Adobe AIR allows for Flash/AS3/AJAX to be used as a desktop app.

Just go check out desktop.ebay.com to see a beta AIR app.

Re:It's the API, stupid ;-)

[devil4heaven]

I don't think as3 is a good programming language after a simple downloading application based on as3, it's grammer is something like under construction not complete, especial used as a java programmer. There is a long way for Actionscript.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[dwater]

while the mobile version of the media player is "is not capable of being used with the web.

Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates). I think he's alluding to the fact that the mobile version of flash just doesn't do the same things as the desktop version. I don't know the details, but there are significant gaps in functionality. There was a fairly recent version of flash which was more useful, on S60 at least, but, again, I don't know the technical details.

Here's something for you to read. Maybe it sheds some light on it.

Quicktime is very good

[Shivetya]

at telling me I need a new version of it.

Requiring me to reboot my iMac to install that new version.

I think they make the windowms machines in my house reboot out of sympathy.

I have to agree with what you put forth. Compared to other players I have always found quicktime to be a dog, especially when embedded in a browsers

Re:Quicktime is very good

[ElBeano]

AND each new version of Quicktime installed Itunes insists on hooking ever deeper into the entrails of Windows...

Re:Quicktime is very good

[elrous0]

I finally got to where I just refused to install Quicktime on my Win-PC (even after I had actually bought it). It got so intrusive and started taking up so much overhead, I finally just installed Quicktime Alternative and started avoiding h264 files as much as possible.

Re:Quicktime is very good

[unfunk]

I just use VLC as my default video player and be done with it. It plays practically everything without need of any silly codecs to be installed...

Re:Quicktime is very good

[Tibor the Hun]

I too hate the quicktime updates because of the reboots.
However, I now understand why it needs a reboot...
Quicktime (not the player) is OS Xs video rendering subsystem (which works in conjunction with Quartz and OpenGL, one is for 2d, the other for 3d). Updating one of OS X's core systems is what requires a restart.

Re:Quicktime is very good

[moosesocks]

Not quite.

It's OS X's media-playback framework/library.

If Apple were faithful to their Unix roots, nothing on OS X should ever require a full reboot apart from kernel updates.

Re:Quicktime is very good

[Tibor the Hun]

Oh yeah. That'd be ideal. It's nice never having to restart my Ubuntu box. (well, other than when X zonks out.)
OS X restarts do happen way too often due to updates.

Mod parent down

[Udo Schmitz]

The post doesn't make sense.

completely control the video

How is Apple controlling h.264?

Not the codecs, but the implementation

[fintux]

The flash video codecs aren't really that cpu intensive. You once were able to download for example the youtube videos in flv format from cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=<youtube_video_id> (I tried this now, and it didn't seem to work anymore). That video could then be played with MPlayer, to mention one *. Unfortunately, MPlayer was not able to play all videos (I guess that's because flv is actually a container format, and can have several codecs). But those videos that did play, plaid with a much better performance.

I don't really think that it is the codec that is the problem. I guess that the biggest problem is that Adobe refuses to use any of the acceleration techniques for the playback. While that probably makes the code much more portable between different architectures and operating systems, it really is a performance bottleneck.

*) That's what the uktube of ukmplayer (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/) does on N8x0. It seems to do some further tricks with the url, and therefore works even though the cache.googlevideo.com doesn't work anymore.

Re:Not the codecs, but the implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still get the .flv manually.
In firefox, load the video in youtube, then copy its ID from the address bar. (if the full address looks like "http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=2GWPOPSXGYI&feature=related" then the ID is just "2GWPOPSXGYI")

The pop open a new tab and go to about:cache to look at your disk cache. Find the matching get_video entry (using Find In This Page) and click it, then click the "key" link and voila, you can save the .flv.

Troubleshoot Your System

[DilutedImage]

Perhaps you could share your system configuration, rather than assuming your setup is the final word on Flash and Shockwave on OS X.

I've tested content in various versions of FireFox and Safari, on the following systems, without any problems:

- Mac OS X 10.4.11, on Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, with 2.5GB DDR
- Mac OS X 10.4.10, on 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2

I've also got a couple G4s that play Flash content well. It certainly chugs on my clamshell iBook G3 though (especially now that it's deceased).

May be a reason to get one ...

[dltaylor]

I abhor the (ab)use of Flash on the Web. Many sites don't allow access, at all, unless a specific version of Flash is installed, even if all the information I want could be easily handled with static text pages. Additionally, the Flash player implementations allow Trojans trivially (not that QuickTime is without its own issues).

Is it the fault of those writing the specifications for sites or the site developers that low-to-moderate-bandwidth, Flash-free pages that provide all the information a visitor needs are not developed? Maybe mobile Web access will bring about a change to the current mindlessly Flash burdened paradigm.

That's it! Pandora!

[RMH101]

...now, remind me again why Apple would want you to be able to freely stream music to your iPhone, rather than buy it from iTunes?

Re:That's it! Pandora!

[madjia]

Uhm you know you can put all sorts of music and video's on it, right? As long as it's in the right format. No need to ever buy anything from iTunes to put it on your iPod or iPhone, you can put all your downloaded and ripped music and video's on there. I keep wondering who spread that fairy-tale, my boyfriend honestly believed that too before I got him his own iPod. He seriously thought you had to get everything from the iTunes store.

Re:That's it! Pandora!

[tgd]

Streaming music works fine. Pandora's streaming doesn't.

Nose/spite/face

[jeillah]

Bad or not, by not supporting Flash Apple will be denying iPhone users access to many popular video sites, including YouTube.

Re:Nose/spite/face

[madjia]

There is a YouTube application on the iPod/iPhone, you can browse and search the video's, just without the usual YouTube website interface.

I would love Flash on my iPod, so I can watch 'more' things online, but if the performance it horrible, I'd rather just keep it as is, a smooth, seamless user experience

Re:Jobs is so full of shit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ease up with your +12 Shield of Jobs Protection there, champ.

Or just stop being a cunt.

just wait a few months

[Gearoid_Murphy]

This isn't about flash not meeting Apple standards, this is Apples way of squeezing out flash's dominance in the web media standards without falling foul of the competition litigation. Just wait a few months and Apple will start pushing their "iPhone compatibile" media standard, which needless to say, will be completely proprietary, KKKKKkkkkkkuuuuunntttsss!

Forgot about Steve Jobs

[TheReaperD]

The one thing that you are not factoring in is Steve Jobs himself. He's an absolute control freak and egomaniac. Though he doesn't control every aspect of what Apple is and does, it's not for lack of trying. Making money is a secondary concern for him. He makes a tidy some from his role and stock over at Pixar; much to the dismay of Apple stockholders. It's more about his vision for the product and his desire to control every aspect of the product.

GNASH: FOSS Player

[Doc Ruby]

Flash is Adobe's brand of "SWF", which is a documented format. SWF isn't open, but it's been reverse engineered enough that other SW can generate, edit and play it. "Flash Video" is the FLV file format, has also been reverse engineered.

Will GNASH, the FOSS SWF player that can also play FLV, run on an iPhone? GNASH isn't as crippled as Adobe's Flash player, offering higher framerates on lower grade HW. GNASH has also been ported to run on more HW than Adobe's Flash player has. For GNASH to play FLV, it needs ffmpeg or GStreamer to run - is there a port or equivalent for iPhone?

And if not, who will take the plunge to port this FOSS to iPhone, and make Steve Jobs for once look less than visionary?

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[RiotingPacifist]

I find gnash cant handle most youtube or youtube like sites well, let alone trying to use a game. It may have improved, but i think Flash is one thing where atm you have to pick your battles. Anybody on anything other than windows 32bit ( & maybe mac 32) knows that flash sucks, but its the defacto standard for videos on the internet.

*gnash can do the video playing, but that is one part of youtube but the iPhone will look bad if it cant do the rest.

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[Doc Ruby]

Have you tried GNASH recently? It's been putting out aggressive upgrades, especially in the last few months, as GNASH became a "GNU top priority project" and GNASH nears release 1.0.

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[RiotingPacifist]

Im afraid not, after reading the wiki i was tempted to install it as it seams flash 7 completed (with alot of features from 8 & 9) but i need to use adobe flash for the bbc iplayer so unless theres an easy way to switch between gnash and adobe flash, im only going to use gnash occasionally at best.

Ill be more tempted once they hit beta, although i get the impression that its beta quality (suppose its not gnu's style to get as far as beta :P)

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[NtroP]

Flash is Adobe's brand of "SWF", which is a documented format. SWF isn't open, but it's been reverse engineered enough that other SW can generate, edit and play it. "Flash Video" is the FLV file format, has also been reverse engineered.

Will GNASH, the FOSS SWF player that can also play FLV, run on an iPhone? GNASH isn't as crippled as Adobe's Flash player, offering higher framerates on lower grade HW. GNASH has also been ported to run on more HW than Adobe's Flash player has. For GNASH to play FLV, it needs ffmpeg or GStreamer to run - is there a port or equivalent for iPhone?

And if not, who will take the plunge to port this FOSS to iPhone, and make Steve Jobs for once look less than visionary?

I don't doubt that there will be 3rd-party FLV players for the iPhone. I don't think playing video content is what The Steve is talking about. I think he's talking about the rest of the flash-enable crap out there on the web, including front-page, interactive splash-screens, flash adds, and embedded flash content that clue-missing web designers inflict on us. These are things that even Flash Lite can't handle - which everyone is touting as "My phone plays flash!". Playing an FLV/SWF file is not the same as "having Flash capability in your browser".

Frankly, if the fact that iPhone users are complaining to restaurants and other businesses that they can't access their site because of all the Flash-only crap gets site owners to follow W3C standards (like Steve said should be the focus) I'm all for it.

I know people have personally found some specific benefit from Flash-based apps. I also know some people have found some specific benefit from ActiveX apps. That does not mean that either technology belongs on the public internet where accessibility and ubiquity are supposed to rule.

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[MachineShedFred]

Hopefully with the impending release of a (presumed?) proper SDK for the iPhone, these questions will be answered rather quickly.

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[Doc Ruby]

Well, ActiveX is very different from Flash in the reasons either is more or less acceptable for a Web platform. And the more standards compliant are the Flash apps on the Web, the more likely they'll run correctly on GNASH (though GNASH has reverse-engineered some "necessary bugs" the SWFs require in their "Flash" player).

Flash is cross-platform, interactive, and has a better IDE for interactive UIs than do other technologies like Java. It's got a place, because it's got momentum, and it's not doomed by security or proprietary limits like ActiveX was. The next hurdle will be Adobe's support for DRM in Flash that goes beyond what's right and legal, as usual, to illegally curtail Fair Use rights of people to their own content. GNASH will not support that kind of DRM. So another possible strike against Flash will be dodged by GNASH. However, I do expect that the Java VMs will increasingly support DRM. Especially as mobile phones (which mostly all run Java) are increasingly used to consume media that people will want to both share with other people and reuse on their own other devices.

More choices of robust platforms means the DRM noose (among others) will be harder to catch a critical mass of people in. That will keep us all more free.

Re:GNASH: FOSS Player

[Russ Nelson]

Gnash 0.8.2 was just released on Wednesday morning. Binaries will take a bit of time to produce, but they'll be available from http://www.getgnash.org/ and eventually through your distro.

Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[theophilosophilus]

Why not let the market decide?

Jobs scares me because he likes to make decisions for me. He may be behind an innovative company but systems that lock-in and lock-out are anti-consumer. DRM is simply a method of lock-in. Dragging your feet on an SDK is lock-out. I can't support products by a company that has a habit of restricting my rights to use something I paid them for.

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[Zelos]

Presumably if Flash on mobile devices is important and easy to implement, then some other phone company will release a Flash-supporting handset and the market will buy that instead.

It's not like the iPhone is the only smartphone out there.

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[theophilosophilus]

It's not like the iPhone is the only smartphone out there. It is for people that bought it and got locked in. I'm glad you have the ability to buy whatever comes along.

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[anothy]

the market will decide. if Jobs is wrong, and Flash really is that important, people will not buy iPhones and will instead buy phones with Flash support. except, to date, that's not what's happening: the iPhone is selling even better than expected and there are no phones with full Flash support. assuming one comes out, it'll be interesting to see what the market reaction is.

"let the market decide" does not mean Apple should cram every possible feature into their products and let "the market" decide which ones to use. Apple produces a product, puts it in a competitive field, and the market decides whether that product covers a good set of things it wants. Jobs is in no way making decisions for you; there's loads of other choices for you.

i agree both lock-in and lock-out are bad, but the Flash decision is neither. the iTunes DRM is troubling, although it's difficult to see what the better answer is for Apple, who doesn't own any of the content. i'm pleased to see the DRM-free selection on iTunes growing. the SDK has taken longer than expected, but i don't think that qualifies as lock-out (legal actions against crackers certainly do, though).

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[MachineShedFred]

Why not? Damned if you do, damned if you don't - that's why.

If Apple doesn't include Flash, people bash them, as you see in this thread. If they include it and it sucks donkey choad (as Mr. Jobs is suggesting it would) then people bitch about how much it sucks, and Apple takes one on the nose for poor quality implementation, even though it might not even be their fault.

The iPhone is a flagship product, and it's claim to fame is largely based on how slick it is, and how well it works. Strapping on some allegedly half-assed bloatware code from another vendor is quite possibly the best way to destroy that reputation.

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[PortHaven]

Others do...

iPhone = wonderful mobile interface, without any features most people are used too (ie: GPS, Broadband Data, Voice Dial, Copy/Paste, 3rd Party Apps)

versus most other PDA's which have all of that, but in a clunky, buggy, poorly designed interface (ie: WM5 requires 7 clicks in order to close a program by default)

Re:Yesuh Mastah Jobs

[PortHaven]

Not necessarily true...

The market has wanted a good PDA Convergence device for a decade now. But hasn't received one. Part of the problem is that we still need these devices, regardless if they're buggy as hell and royally suck, so we're still buying.

iPhone had the chance to be it, sadly, it fell far short on features but climbed very high on interface. Hopefully, later versions will support the features people need and look nice & have good ease of use too.

Symptoms only masked on other platforms

[jago25_98]

Good for him. Finally someone else who agrees with me that Flash is an hideously inefficient creation. It's rubbish on all platforms, it's just the symptoms are usually masked.

Re:K & G?

[Anonymous Coward]

They stand out by not being window managers.

But, Doctor Evil...

[argent]

Ummm... Doctor Evil... they already released their iPhone compatible media standard, and it's an actual standard codec: H.264 - MPEG4 part 10.

Want to try again?

Re:But, Doctor Evil...

[Gearoid_Murphy]

I stand corrected.

Hmm...

[TheNetAvenger]

So is this just Apple trying to lock in content, or are there real reasons behind this?

I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid. I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.

I think this is pretty much a non-issue. Apple and iPhone fans will do what Jobs tells them to do and will abandon Flash aspirations if told to do so.

The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.

I know the iPhone multi-touch interface is interesting in concept, but not as practical as people would like to believe. This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/smartphone/details.mspx?id=e03c4483-a898-4ebb-a0e8-5f58c7547269&backUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindowsmobile%2Fsmartphone%2Fdefault.mspx&WT.mc_ID=wmhome_attTilt

Which makes the iPhone look like a toy...

Re:Hmm...

[anothy]

So is this just Apple trying to lock in content...

sigh. how, exactly, would this help Apple lock-in content? the alternatives they support are published, open industry standards in wide use by loads of content producers before the iPhone even hit the market. there's a much richer field of competitors for MPEG decoders than flash decoders.

...or are there real reasons behind this?

the current flash player is very poor. it's highly inefficient, which is a coding issue, and presumes a certain application flow. the first would be addressable if Adobe rewrote the player, but they're not likely to do that any time soon; the second results in all sorts of kludges to wedge it in places it's not intended for. Apple tries hard to sell kludge-free products.

I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid.

"3G" doesn't mean what you think it does. the current iPhone has a "3G" connection. i've said this about a dozen times here on slashdot: by any technical definition of 3G, most relevantly those from the ITU and 3GPP, EDGE is one of a set of 3G technologies. what you mean is that flash over a not-fast-enough connection would be horrid. and there we have another instance of the efficiency issue above. modern MPEG encodings are more bandwidth efficient.

I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.

Flash and Flash Lite are very, very different things. it's not simply a question of optimization; they present different feature sets (i believe, but am not certain, Flash Lite is a proper subset of Flash; can anyone knowledgeable confirm?).

The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.

show me. first, remember that Flash Lite is not Flash. so which phone are you referring to? you also focus solely on feature set, which is only a small part of the experience of using any device. Apple excels at crafting that experience, of which feature set is a part. the iPhone stands out because the vast majority of mobile phone (to a lesser extent, mobile devices generally) interfaces... well, suck. Nokia does a reasonable job on their high-end models; Palm OS is good but dying for other reasons. beyond that, it's mostly all crap. even the iPhone only nudges into the "pretty good" category, but that already puts them way ahead of most of their competition.

This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:

the idea that only fanboys ("fanboi" makes you sound like even more of a tool, by the way) of a company can choose a product by that company is astoundingly juvenile (and much more prevalent than i understand). i pick products based on what works for me; sometimes that means i buy Apple products, sometimes Motorola, sometimes Linksys, or whoever. i pick the tool that fits the job. i have no particular devotion to any company beyond recognizing a trend of them producing tools that tend to fit the jobs i run across.
the Tilt is a reasonably interesting phone, except for running Windows Mobile, which is a horrid interface for small devices. it's hard to see how it makes an iPhone look like a toy, though. the feature set is not "above" the iPhone, just off to the side. it depends what you want.

Re:Hmm...

[TheNetAvenger]

sigh. how, exactly, would this help Apple lock-in content?

Ok, the sigh = I'm a Fanboi and I don't get why people beat up on my Hero

This would help Apple in MANY ways, as Flash is ALSO a development platform, as well as being content distribution. So no games written in Flash will be available, and no Video content that is not Apple 'approved' will not be available.

the alternatives they support are published, open industry standards

Um, except for their DRM variations, and the fact they also don't support the mainstream alternatives either for audio or video distribution. Let's just contrast this with a Windows Mobile Phone. Can iPhone do DivX, WMA, VC1, etc?

And since most of the online content providers that are NOT iTunes, use these other formats, leaving iPhone locked into iTunes and Apple. Also VC1 is an industry HD standard (even though it has SD formats as well), and Apple has no plans to provide support, ever.

"3G" doesn't mean what you think it does. the current iPhone has a "3G" connection

Wow, really into hair spliting... Yes, technically EDGE is 3G, but most people reference 3G with comparison to the relative bandwidth since Edge would then be an unofficial 2.75G, not 3G. (3G's meaning has changed from its original design specifications, when you talk 3G, you better mean 3G bandwidth. PERIOD)

the current flash player is very poor... Apple tries hard to sell kludge-free products.

I am not a big fan of Flash in this regard, but sadly the DESKTOP Flash player is only a dog on non-Windows platforms. OS X being the worest performer for flash content.

Flash and Flash Lite are very, very different things

Sure, technically they are different, but not like you seem to think. Flash Lite handles Flash 8 and Video content flawlessly. The reason it is called Flash Lite, is because it can run under BREW and on tons of mobile Phone OSes, including Windows Mobile.

Also why is this important, I never claimed there were identical, and sadly you won't be able to do either on the iPhone...

show me. first, remember that Flash Lite is not Flash. so which phone are you referring to?

Even though they are different, they RUN the same freaking content up to Flash 8 specifications.

Which phone? How about almost any phone, pick a Motorola, Nokia, Windows Mobile, etc. Almost all of them have a version of Flash Lite. This is OLD news for everyone outside of the Apple distortion field?

The rest of your conclusions about Apple being good at subsets, blah blah, are wrong since you are referencing something that isn't even subset limited like Flash Lite.

Hey lets even make this more of an argument, Apple planning on supporting Silverlight? It was just announced that it won't be limited to Windows Mobile, and be ported to several Phone OSes. And again, like Flash, not only does it provide Video and content, it is a development platform for making applications and games.

i pick products based on what works for me

Really, so an iPhone with less features and more money worked for you how again? Sadly my 3 year old Motorola literally has more features than the iPhone, and all of the Windows Mobile phones have 10x the features of an iPhone. (A Windows Mobile Phone can even remote into your desktop or servers and lets you control them as if you were sitting in front of them. iPhone is way out of its league in this type of 'meets my needs' argument. Gasp!

SIGH....

Re:Hmm...

[anothy]

Ok, the sigh = I'm a Fanboi...

no, the "sigh" is shorthand for "this argument is very tired, wrong every time its repeated, and based on a knee-jerk emotional reaction rather than logic. i probably shouldn't bother feeding the troll, but have a weakness for technical stupidity on what's supposed to be a geek site." you understand that "sigh" is shorter.

This would help Apple in MANY ways...

yes, it would. it's clearly at least partially a strategically motivated decision (in addition to the practical reality that flash current sucks, technically). but that's not what you said. you said it would help Apple "lock in content", which is very different. not all strategic business decisions are anti-competitive or anti-consumer.

Um, except for their DRM variations...

a fair point. DRM does (clearly) involve lock-in. of course, the DRMd content is not Apple's, they're just the retailer. Apple likes to get DRM-free content out (see the "plus" stuff on iTunes), but their first priority is getting any content out. it's a fair question as to whether or not this is good for the world generally in the long term.

...and the fact they also don't support the mainstream alternatives...

what, all of them? sure, true. but the support the most common (real) industry standards (MPEG derivatives). again, even if there were something nefarious to this decision (there isn't, as far as anyone can show), it wouldn't help "lock in" content at all; it locks content out, if you can call it that (which is a very good reason to believe there's nothing nefarious going on; surely Apple wants as much content on their devices as possible, all other things being equal).
sticking the Windows Media codecs on your list is particularly telling. these are anything but open, far from market leading (especially on audio), and have the same strategic profile for support that Flash does, from Apple's point of view.

And since most of the online content providers that are NOT iTunes, use these other formats...

which, together, amount for a minority of online sales. also, i doubt your figures; cite? personally, i use or have used (only still on iTunes and eMusic) other, all of which are MP3 or similar.

Wow, really into hair spliting...

certainly not the first time i've been accused of that. i don't think the difference between "has" and "doesn't have" qualifies as hair splitting, though.

3G's meaning has changed from its original design specifications, when you talk 3G, you better mean 3G bandwidth. PERIOD

oh, PERIOD? thanks for clearing that up for me. very persuasive: "3G means 3G". sweet. now, please define "3G bandwidth". that's exactly the problem. i'd be perfectly happy if the industry adopted a meaning that simply said "100kbps or better" (or whatever), but there is simply no consensus on what "3G" means outside the technical standards i've referenced. now, that's fine in at&t's glossy sales literature, but this is a technical community. precision matters.

...sadly the DESKTOP Flash player is only a dog on non-Windows platforms.

the resource consumption of Flash is bad on Win32 on IA32, too, just less so.
you also clipped the rest of my quote (it wasn't just about Flash) and seem to have misread whatever you took to be talking about subsets.

Really, so an iPhone... ...worked for you how again?

huh. cute assumption. don't have one. support for Verizon's network, having the best coverage in the US, is a pre-requisite for any phone i buy. thus, the iPhone doesn't fit my requirements, so i haven't bought one. i'd really like an iPod Touch, once they release one with enough storage to hold my library. this isn't about "my phone is better than your phone"; i can discuss products witho

Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[stewbacca]

For once I can say it; Steve Jobs is wrong. Slow content is better than no content, Mr. Jobs. But alas, you already knew that, because you've included the EDGE network with my iPhone.

I am in Instructional Designer and churn out a billion flash-based products a year, some of them even targeted for cell phones. Amazing how Adobe has the insight to include preset sizes and compression schemes to fit a number of different cell phones out there -- the iPhone conspicuously not one of them.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[anothy]

Slow content is better than no content

in the short term, sure. but what Jobs is trying to do is get folks to move their content over to better formats, where it'll be faster. a better experience in content consumption will lead to more demand for content, in turn leading to more content being made available. so, once you add a time dimension to the equation, the question really becomes whether slow content for a long, long time is better than no content for a little while and fast content soon.

apple has a history of pushing the migration from established, older, inferior technologies to newer, better ones. i'm happy to see that continuing here. i'd be quite happy to see flash simply go away on the web. a decade ago, when bandwidth, memory, and cycles were all more constrained, the hack that is flash was a reasonable solution. the situation has changed, and flash is no longer a reasonable answer, and should be discarded.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[Ma8thew]

Slow content is NOT better than no content from Apple's point of view. They don't want the slick and responsive interface of the iPhone spoiled by a slow application. When that happens, Adobe won't get the blame, Apple will. Apple are not successful because they put every possible function in their devices. People have been moaning about the iPod's lack of FM radio for years, but that hasn't stopped it taking 70% of the audio player market. Apple are successful because they implement every function well designed manner.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[seanonymous]

Ok, Mr. Flash Guru, how do you trigger a mouse-over event with an iPhone? How do you set up a key listener when the user can't access the keyboard unless a text field is selected? Stop confusing Flash video with Flash for a second and think about the interface, then you'll understand why there's no Flash Player on the iPhone.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[stewbacca]

I'm not confusing Flash video with Flash, although I think a lot of other people in this thread are. You can create instructional/tutorial files in Flash that don't require any input. In fact, Captivate does exactly this, yet the default output is .swf (not flash movie). I would guess the answer to your valid questions would be "Apple needs to put that in their SDK", but given Jobs' statement, I doubt that will happen. Maybe the capability is already there. Mouse-over could be "translated" from a finger drag across and mouse clicks are translated from finger pokes. I'd imagine you'd select a text field the same way you do now on the iPhone with any other type of web page.

There is simply too much stuff out there on the web that is flash based that doesn't require any type of input that isn't visible from the iPhone, which is shame. I understand the other guy's post about Apple pushing the envelope and killing off ugly trends, but in my field (Software Simulation & Training), Flash is the preferred tool, supplanting even more robust packages like Director and Authorware. Most the heavy hitter multimedia authoring suites have fallen out of favor for Flash, like it or not (personal, I don't like it, but it pays the bills).

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[PortHaven]

Please name a single product that can do everything Flash can do...

Sorry, there just isn't...

***

Yes, there are better video delivery tools.

Yes, SVGs can be used to do animations (except very few people will be able to view them)

And like taxes, you will always have SPAM and adverts...

But if you think that's ALL Flash does, you've not seen Flash based technologies. Nor developed for them...and with the launch of AIR you can now re-use much of your code for desktop applications too.

People keep trying to compare Flash to what it's not and dissing it for not being the best. Rather, than realizing it is a diverse tool, perhaps a Jack-Of-All-Trades master of none. But very powerful in it's own right.

Just for grins and giggles go compare Google's Online Word Processor to Buzzword.com (which had far less resources and far less development time than Google's word processor).

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[PortHaven]

I call BULLSHIT...

Or SJ would have built a slightly larger iPhone with a bigger battery and given us high speed data via 3G+.

Don't tell me SJ was worried about performance, I tried watching a video via EDGE. Slow is one thing....after three attempts I had not managed to get a single video to play completely without pause, stutters, etc.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[Ma8thew]

That would have compromised on design too. The device would have to be thicker and heavier, and with a 3g chip the battery would likely have not lasted as long.

Re:Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it)

[anothy]

Please name a single product that can do everything Flash can do...

Sorry, there just isn't...

you miss the point, and you're counterpoint is entirely irrelevant. it might (maybe) be true that no single technology can replace flash. so? a large part of the problem with flash is the monolithic nature of it. there's no reason all that functionality should be in one place. the only upside of that form of centralization is to change the shape of the learning curve for new developers so that the earlier parts are less steep. the costs of this tradeoff are substantial, and almost certainly outweigh those benefits now that better technologies are available.

Refreshing...

[RandomUsername99]

For the record, I just got rid of my (non iphone) smartphone to buy a cellphone that was primarily a cell phone. I don't own any apple computers, or even an ipod. I'm not an apple fanboy. That said:

Working for a large company in the software industry, it's refreshing to see someone actually opt out of having another bullet point on their feature list to keep the integrity of their product. Having flash perform badly on their phones may bump up their sales by 20% in the quarter when the youtube fanatics hear about it, but it'll hurt them not too long after when they realize that the feature they bought it for works poorly. I know that my company would have much better quality products if we thought beyond the next quarter or two's marketing plan.

And to the people who rib apple for having created a device that won't run flash... Let's look at the minimum system requirements for the current version of Linux flash:

Modern processor (800MHz or faster) 512MB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory
with a *recommended*
Intel Pentium 4 2.33GHz processor (or equivalent) 128MB of RAM 64MB of VRAM

Almost a gigahertz processor and half a gig of ram? This would have bumped everything but the bleeding edge off the map 10 years ago on processor speed and ram alone, and 128MB of graphics memory? Forget about it... and the recommended stats (which for some reason are lower than the minimum system requirements in RAM and VRAM... http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ maybe the low processor speed requires more mem?) on processor speed exclude many desktops sitting in homes today.

This is a CELL PHONE people! :)

Maybe on a half-technical cell phone review site i'd expected the reactionary "I can't believe they don't support flash" attitude as if they were just being lazy about it, but on a website where supposedly technical people understand the actual limitations that they run into with this stuff, come on.

Re:Refreshing...

[Khuffie]

This would have bumped everything but the bleeding edge off the map 10 years ago on processor speed and ram alone, and 128MB of graphics memory This is not 10 years ago. Hey, guess what? The requirements for Safari on Windows are as follows: Windows XP or Vista At least 256MB of RAM 500Mhz Pentium-class processor or better The iPhone seems to run it just fine. Things can easily be optimized when you have a single-known hardware to work off of.

Microsoft to the rescue!

[Mongoose Disciple]

Flash can't do the job on the iPhone? Sounds like a job for Silverlight!

*crickets*

Re:Microsoft to the rescue!

[BearRanger]

You laugh, but this idea probably isn't off the table.

If Silverlight is sufficiently open Apple wouldn't have a problem using it. Their relationship with Microsoft isn't quite as adversarial as it once was. It's the fans who imagine that it is so much more than the companies themselves.

Microsoft would absolutely jump at the chance to have a software "win" for Silverlight on a popular device, even if it's one they don't control. The publicity and visibility would be a huge boost.

Of course Silverlight would still have to deliver and at the moment I don't think there's much chance of that. But both companies would benefit immensely if it could be made to meet Apple's needs and it gained critical mass in the marketplace.

Re:Microsoft to the rescue!

[Mongoose Disciple]

Of course Silverlight would still have to deliver and at the moment I don't think there's much chance of that.

You know, now that I think about it, I'm not even so sure of that.

The people I know who have spent a lot more time playing with Silverlight than I have say that it's already very good for doing interesting things with video files, and that it's most other areas where it still has a lot of catching up to Flash to do.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[stewbacca]

I mean, sure, your '$600 toy' isn't as powerful as a laptop... As long as people keep purposefully misquoting the iPhone price, I will keep disregarding the rest of their posts.

Flash Lite is more than "optimized"

[blueZ3]

It also has fewer features that "full" Flash. In other Words, sites that use the latest and greatest version of Flash (and specifically, the latest, two-year-old version of Action Script) don't render the same on "Flash Lite" as they do under the "full" version. The lite version may be great for viewing movies, but I don't think it's very good for much of anything else. I can speak on this subject from experience, having worked on Web-based tools for Palm users at a former employer. Flash seemed like a nice way to handle some of the things we needed to do, but the lite version on the Sony PDAs didn't support all the features we would have needed. We ended up writing a native app that pulled data from the Web.

Beyond the inadequacies of Flash lite, there are user experience issues here, too. Action script provides the ability to capture key presses, something that a lot of game sites use but that would be very difficult to support on the iPhone with it's on-screen keyboard. If you've seen data entry on the iPhone in Safari when in landscape mode, you know that the screen essentially disappears when the keyboard is displayed, making it very difficult to see where you're typing what you're typing. Also, the multi-touch interface isn't very mouse-like, which adds another area where the user experience would be less than optimal.

I'm not saying that Apple has necessarily thought all this through, though I think it's likely that they have. But it does seem like Flash on the iPhone is probably not worth implementing.

intelligent streaming

[spidkit]

So-called "intelligent streaming" and dropped packet resend from streaming servers is an important feature. Same for switching to a lower bandwidth stream on the fly to mitigate against jerky video playback. Windows Media, Real Helix DNA and QuickTime streaming servers (the latter two also being free) resend dropped packets and some will shift the bandwidth of the stream based on the client's player bandwidth and performance setting on the fly - Flash Streaming servers appear to not currently have this implemented.

Huh? Seems to work fine

[J05H]

I really don't get it. We played "Industry Standard" on Bob's new iPhone over WiFi and it looked GREAT. Not just great, but better than on my PC great. What is The Steve jabbering about? Maybe if you try to load some craptastic webpage with a full UI of Flash and 17 videos playing simultaneously on it, but YouTube's Flash video plays fine on the iPhone and that is what counts for 99% of users.

Re:Huh? Seems to work fine

[Khuffie]

May I ask how you installed the flash player on the iphone? (Mine's already jail-broken)

Re:Huh? Seems to work fine

[MachineShedFred]

The YouTube videos played on the iPhone aren't Flash Video. They are H.264.

Re:Huh? Seems to work fine

[J05H]

didn't need to install anything, just went to youtube.com and searched for my videos - they played fine on his iPhone. Seamless, one might say.

Re:Huh? Seems to work fine

[J05H]

Doh! Foiled again! Curse you Steve Jobs and your tricky media layers!

Re:Huh? Seems to work fine

[Khuffie]

I think you must be mistaken. You must have used the built-in youtube application. It's only a subset of youtube's videos that are converted to be playable on the iphone.

Sounds like a challenge

[thejuggler]

This sounds like a public challenge to Adobe to finally clean up Flash player. Yeah I know they inherited the code from Macromedia, but now it is their code.

In my experience....

[kellyb9]

In my experience, the market will always respond to fill a growing demand. With faster internet connections came flash games, movies, etc. Maybe we'll have to take a few steps back, but this kind of content is in demand for iPhone users. I, for one, think it would be pretty cool to listen to Pandora on an iPhone. Maybe it's not available now, but I'm pretty sure Adobe is looking into it. At least if they were smart, they would.

Can the iphone use it flash space as VM?

[Joe The Dragon]

Can the iphone use it flash space as VM? with 8gb or more 128 to 512 of VM space should be able to fit with out getting in the way.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[MachineShedFred]

Now there you go, letting little things like facts get in the way of a good prejudiced rant...

Re:K & G?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or good.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

J2ME?

[Midnight Thunder]

On a similar note, there has been some indication that Apple will not put Java onto the iPhone. Does anyone know whether there is a J2ME reference implementation that could be adapted by a willing team of developers? Since most basic phones are capable of running Java, you can't use the excuse of lack of memory or CPU in this case.

The Old Joke

[DannyO152]

Volume! 20 cents on the dollar is real money when there's billions served.

fucking idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

you dumb fuck. when you connect to jewtube with an ipod shuffle or iphone you get served the h264 edition of the clips, you don't ''get to see'' the crappy pc-jerksterbat0r editions, because everyone knows doing anything with a pc is cock-in-mouth, which is why faggots and basement-masturbators clinge to their pc's.

Re:fucking idiot

[BSDetector]

I expected this human waste to have a score of 5 based on Slashdot's high editorial standards!

WiFi isn't nowhere either

[SuperKendall]

It does have wifi, but wifi isn't everywhere.

But it's also generally easy to find in daily life, even if it's not omnipresent. When traveling by car outside major cities in fact I'd say WiFi is easier to get than 3G...

Additionally, most flash is bandwidth intensive.

As in - 3G would mostly suck as well.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[mstrom]

I do a fair amount of Flash development, and even I don't like the idea of Flash on my iPod Touch. If not having Flash on a mobile device is wrong, baby, I don't wanna be right.

Flash apps seem great for mobile development, flash video may be a different question but a vector-based format is ideal for low data interchange and rendering on small, variable-sized screens (between devices). It's standard websites, with bitmap (albeit compressed) graphics that are wrong for mobile devices.

That's the theory anyway, in practices Flash Lite sucks and Adobe don't seem to be working at its adoption

Do not forget the overhead of non-sales

[SuperKendall]

I think they are probably making some very small amount of money per-sale as well. But one thing you have to factor in is the large bandwidth bill from all the people who are previewing audio and video, and not buying anything. Also stuff like running the podcast directory when they don't even sell podcasts (perhaps they get some money paid from podcasts for placement? Not sure).

You are the one missing the point

[SuperKendall]

You're missing the point entirely. Whether the iPhone can browse YouTube or whether you can listen to some free podcasts isn't all that important. What matters to Apple is whether they control commercial for-pay content delivery.

If you'd read the original post you'd realize the iPhone can see video from ANY source, using H.264. Including for-pay content delivery...

I can also use iTunes for my Amazon MP3 purchases easily.

Apple just gives you an easy path to get paid content. But nothing stops others from delivering paid content to you - as long as they are willing to remove the DRM.

Now why isn't everyone, including yourself, cheering this model? This is the very model that broke the back of audio DRM and if things work out well, it can do the same for video. Wouldn't you LIKE to be able to purchase unprotected H.264 video from anywhere? Well this is how it happens, you ave one vendor get a lock on paid content and then (to paraphrase Jurassic Park) money will find a way.

Re:You are the one missing the point

[nguy]

Apple just gives you an easy path to get paid content. But nothing stops others from delivering paid content to you - as long as they are willing to remove the DRM.

Exactly. And that is the problem: Apple is the only company that's able to put DRM on the iPhone.

Now why isn't everyone, including yourself, cheering this model?

Because I'm not stupid. You apparently are.

Who's name is on the front door?

[joebob2000]

Adobe acquired, Macromedia merged.

Then what about Android

[SuperKendall]

I don't see any mention of Flash support in Android either. Are you saying that no phone built to use Android will be able to handle Flash? Or is that, too a choice...

welcome to the 90s

[shyberfoptik]

information is entertainment. entertainment is information.

MP4 / Panasonic Hosed me big time..

[PortHaven]

Already been hosed on that hope...

Bought a supposed MP4 camcorder from Panasonic. Except they encapsulated every file in an .asv format. Which Microsoft was supposed to support with their WMP. Except, to this day I can't play any of those files...$400+ down the tubes.

BTW...Panasonic lost my business for life.

Re:MP4 / Panasonic Hosed me big time..

[pizzach]

That is pretty weird. It sounds like they are calling the files mp4 by a technicality because MPEG-4 is in the video codec's name. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. XviD and DivX are based on the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard. Shadey...

Multi-touch screen not a problem.

[PortHaven]

If Flash can handle multiple Wii remotes, I am sure it can handle the iPhone's multi-touch screen...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNnRrzKuzt4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUJBrzGnaSI

That's the solution, not the problem

[SuperKendall]

Exactly. And that is the problem: Apple is the only company that's able to put DRM on the iPhone.

Which doesn't preclude anyone else from selling video to iPhone users. All it precludes is a thousand years of DRM. It doesn't matter what system you have, DRM naturally creates this moat effect that keeps others out. Therefore you cannot have anything different, until you make media companies realize the value in selling DRm free video (which for them will be a wide market).

Because I'm not stupid. You apparently are.

Right, because your love and support of DRM is so sensible. We already know the model falls down eventually, we have music to prove this, so why are you trying to prop it up? You have only empty words and emptier ideas, that have no basis in what has happened or what will happen.

I'd rather be stupid and right than smart and wrong.

Re:That's the solution, not the problem

[nguy]

Right, because your love and support of DRM is so sensible.

Get real. The iPhone is both DRM-infested and non-programmable, and I reject it for both reasons. Apple is one of the biggest purveyors of DRM-infested shit.

Tried that in an AT&T store....sucked

[PortHaven]

Couldn't get a single video to play over EDGE completely without jitters or stopping.

Re:Tried that in an AT&T store....sucked

[madjia]

It is awesome on wi-fi, which is available pretty much everywhere I go (where I live no official iPhone yet, but there is the iPod Touch)

Re:Tried that in an AT&T store....sucked

[PortHaven]

You must not go very far...

I am so tired of people pushing WiFi as an alternative to Wireless Broadband. It's great for people living in Seattle and drinking Seattle Coffee (Starbuck's).

However, for most of us it's pretty useless. I have had wifi on my phone for a couple of years now. I've used it twice. Once when I first got it, and once to show someone it had it.

There has not been a single time I've needed internet access when there has been an open WiFi network available.

Compare that to driving from Connecticut to Maryland while tethering my laptop to my phone. Doing programming and web development over an EvDO connection nearly the entire time. I lost signal once, and a few times in the boonies I had to drop to 1x (EDGE equivalent snail speed). But much of the trip I had an EvDO connection.

*shrug*

So that's a non-answer to me...but you're forgiven. You've probably never enjoy the joy of having a decent internet connection just about any where you travel. ;)

Why the iPhone should have been on Verizon!

Verizon = best network + suckiest phones

Verizon + iPhone = the best cell platform

Re:Tried that in an AT&T store....sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

driving from Connecticut to Maryland while tethering my laptop to my phone. Doing programming and web development over an EvDO connection nearly the entire time.

Coding while driving? Man, I'm sure glad I live on the opposite side of the continent from you... ;-)

Re:Tried that in an AT&T store....sucked

[madjia]

"You must not go very far...""

Hehe actually live in the Netherlands and we have a lot of wi-fi spots around. And on most of my travels, in airports and hotels, there's almost always wi-fi too.

"You've probably never enjoy the joy of having a decent internet connection just about any where you travel. ;)"

I have very good internet connections wherever I go mostly, but then how much of a connection do your really need? I man yeah for downloading files the faster the better, but for most regular uses of the net, even online gaming, it really doesn't matter. I do use wired net for my FPS games though ;)

Anyways, for ME having wi-fi rocks and it works just great, that's why I bought one, but I can also perfectly understand that for others it's not an option and well, don't buy one in that case :)

A little OT but..

[POTSandPANS]

Why would the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) do a story about software that does not run on a cellphone that is not even officially available for purchase in Canada?

Re:Nice way of saying...

[geminidomino]

I mean, sure, your '$600 toy' isn't as powerful as a laptop... As long as people keep purposefully misquoting the iPhone price, I will keep disregarding the rest of their posts. I'm sure that will just break their widdwe hearts.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[Fahrvergnuugen]

As for not suitable for use on the web, I suspect that's SJ's polite version of "it's shite".

Actually, he means its not suitable for the web. Flash Lite will not interpret or "play" any old SWF file or even work as a browser plugin - so it's basically useless to iPhone owners, because it won't display flash embedded in a browser anyway.

As I told you, DRM to end DRM

[SuperKendall]

Get real. The iPhone is both DRM-infested

But also non-DRM infested. You can use MP3, you can use h.264, all open standards. You have the choice as user what to use, and the DRM that is present on the platform is helping to squeeze DRM from all other sources by forcing them to either drop DRm or capitulate to Apple's sales whims. By not backing the quickest possible path to Apple's total control of Video DRM, you are extending the life of all forms of video DRM. Your choice - and you choose.... poorly.

and non-programmable

You are typing to someone who just registered for the iPhone SDK, to develop some free and some paid application.

Like I said, you may think I'm stupid but I'm obviously right. If you are incorrect when arguing with a stupid person, than what does that make your ideas?

Re:As I told you, DRM to end DRM

[nguy]

You are typing to someone who just registered for the iPhone SDK, to develop some free and some paid application.

Apple approves every single application and you have to connect to their servers to install anything. What that means is that Apple can program your phone, you cannot.

By not backing the quickest possible path to Apple's total control of Video DRM

You think Apple is going to give up on DRM once they control it? How naive can you be? Apple is evil; they have shown that time and again.

Re:As I told you, DRM to end DRM

[SuperKendall]

Apple approves every single application and you have to connect to their servers to install anything. What that means is that Apple can program your phone, you cannot.

Actually no, ANYONE can download the SDK and write anything they want for their own phone. No Apple involved except for downloading the SDK.

Distribution is another matter, but there aren't many things Apple would limit, and they've given developers almost full OS access.

You think Apple is going to give up on DRM once they control it?

Jeepers you are dense. Of course they wouldn't. They don't have to, because the market diminishes the power of the DRM by finally selling DRM free video. Just as is happening now with music. Then it becomes utterly irrelevant who holds the keys to the "winning" DRM, because no-one needs it anymore - as is happening with iTunes Plus, where Apple is even marginalizing their own DRM driven by market pressures (and the realization that killing DRM improves sales). In the end we can buy music from anywhere, and play on any device because it's all using open standards. That's the world I want to see for video but it'll never happen if it's up to the cartels that control video distribution today. Someone has to make them see reason and it might as well be Apple since they have already succeeded in Music.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[stewbacca]

Well, until I can mod them "-1 Overtly Biased: Against", it's my only option.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[zebtron]

Sounds like BS to me.
My Nokia n800 runs Flash 9 fine (that was until I accidentally ran it over with my car).

Re:Nice way of saying...

[dwater]

IINM, the N800 runs the full version of flash, not the mobile version aka flash light.

What effect did running it have on battery life?

flash=pandora

[transfat0g]

I don't know about you guys but I like to listen to pandora radio while at home. I have also been looking to replace my ipod which got swiped, with some kind of newfangled wifi PMP or MID.. For me being able to run pandora radio on my mobile device would be a mega plus.. Hence the need for flash on iphone/ipodtouch..

Have you heard of the Nokia N800?

[cbhacking]

Technically it's not a phone in and of itself - it can use Bluetooth to go online through your cell phone, but has no cellular chip itself - but it does have WiFi. It's a little bigger than the iPhone but still fits in a pocket. Its processor is about 400MHz ARM, it runs a version of Debian, and it uses a Gecko-based browser.

Most relevant to the discussion, it has full Flash support. Full in this sense meaning it can visit Pandora.com, Youtube, and every other Flash-based site I've ever tried to access. Its RAM and CPU are weak enough that performance sometimes suffers - Pandora takes about 3x as long to load as on my desktop, and Youtube drops some frames - but it works. Battery life is affected, down from about 7 hours of constant usage to about 2 hours while playing Flash (the battery life meter isn't very precise). This is using WiFi, not a cell link (Bluetooth turned off).

Maybe there's some reason that the iPhone - which has similar CPU, etc. and doesn't even use X - can't use Flash when the N800/N810 (same but a hardware keyboard is built in) can. I can't think of a particularly good reason, though.

Re:Have you heard of the Nokia N800?

[vertigoCiel]

Looking at the Ars Technica review, it seems that the N800 uses Flash 7, two versions removed from the current Flash 9 viewer. It seems you haven't been to many sites that use Actionscript 3, or the later features of Actionscript 2 introduced in Flash 8. I'd say using a five-year old version of the Flash player doesn't really qualify as "full Flash support."

However, it is a damn sight better than Flash Lite, and it's impressive that even Flash 7 is running on a 400 MHz ARM chip. However, there are large tradeoffs in performance and usability - the Ars Technica review says that they got 1-2 fps on YouTube videos. Also, as you say, it significantly cuts down on battery life, dropping it to less than a third of its original figure.

Apple would never ship the iPhone with a Flash player like that, because the average consumer is not a nerd. If the iPhone shipped with a slow Flash player, I'd think "Wow, even getting Flash on this is impressive!" However, Joe Blow thinks "this sucks. Why is it so slow? Flash works on my desktop. Why won't it work on my iPhone?" Nerds will deal with performance and usability drawbacks if they allow new functionality, average people won't. This may not be a particularly good reason for you, but I think it makes sense.

Re:Have you heard of the Nokia N800?

[cbhacking]

You should really check the date on any tech articles you read online. Chinook (the latest version of Maemo, the Linux distribution on the n8x0) runs Flash 9. YouTube is now quite usable, as is Pandora.com and every other site I've tried.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[eechuah]

This is daft. My pocketpc (HTC Trinity) can play youtube videos using the flv plugin on TCPMP. And yes, battery life is longer than ten minutes. There is no stuttering whatsoever. Does anyone on Slashdot even have a smartphone?

Re:Nice way of saying...

[beelsebob]

I agree 100%. Note that all I did was quote the parent. It was meant to be somewhat sarcastic, but I guess next time I need the tags.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[vertigoCiel]

Playing FLVs != browsing Flash websites.

An FLV is basically a container for video which Flash (or, as in your case, another media player) can parse. Playing FLVs is completely different from having the Flash Player, which is where the limited resources of smartphones makes things impractical.

Never underestimate the creativity of developers

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

that's one thing I've learned in watching this industry for almost 30 years

No Flash on iPhone....

[LinuxLuver]

So you can't play Youtube vids on the iPhone? I can play them just fine on my Samsung a900 cell phone. The iPhone is already very expensive. Wy I want to apy more for less functionality than a phone costing half as much? My current cellphone is a Huawei badged as Vodafone and costing - full price - about US120. I can check my gmail on it. I can watch mobel TV (9 channels). It's a camera, still and video, it plays MP3s and will play an 3gp vid I copy to it from my laptop. Why would I pay 5-7 times as muc for a phone that does basically the same things? If I want Wifi, I'll get an ASUS eeePC.....for less than an iPhone. Using Skype, it can be a MUCH cheaper "cell phone" anyway. Apple shouldn't get too up themselves over their cool toys. Other devices are close enough and cheap enough....and more open to use on a variety of networks.