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Want Flash Player On a MacBook Air? Download It Yourself

Posted by timothy on from the how-can-I-download-a-computer dept.

AmiMoJo writes "MacBook Airs are no longer shipping with Flash. Apple spokesperson Bill Evans said: 'We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.'"

13 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Lies. by Entropius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It has nothing to do with the latest version -- Flash has an auto-updater. If they ship with it, it'll just auto-update when the machine is first connected to the internet.

    No, you're not happy to support it, considering that your company has some sort of vendetta against Flash.

    1. Re:Lies. by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yep. It's more to do with not shipping with crap-ware that they then have to support / maintain because it "came with my Mac". Been running with flash-block for a few years now and the 'net is a much nicer place...

      Simon

      --
      Physicists get Hadrons!
    2. Re:Lies. by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How is this any different the Ubuntu Linux?
      It doesn't come with flash either.
      You have to download it directly.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    3. Re:Lies. by PrimeWaveZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, Flash for the Mac does not have an auto update mechanism. Many people rely on Apple to supply Flash updates by way of OS updates. It's been that way for years. The latest spate of security issues with Flash has changed the landscape a bit.

      When Apple qualified a version of Flash to ship with an OS update, but that version is a revision behind what Adobe has publicly posted, Apple is given shit for not having the latest update in their distribution. When Apple decides to let Adobe do the legwork in getting the newest version into peoples' hands, Apple is given more shit.

      I don't see this being much different from the position on Java: third-party crap that they don't want to be responsible for anymore.

      If Adobe wants to have Flash be up to date on the Mac, they can do it themselves.

      As an aside, but as a still peripherally-related statement, about the only third party software I'm in favor of Apple supplying themselves is printer drivers. That stuff is constantly changing, and though I rarely print, I think that it's more important to support those vendors and get the latest print software out there than to get the newest versions of slow, antiquated runtimes onto machines.

    4. Re:Lies. by Americano · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, when Ubuntu does it, it's a victory for openness and user choice.

      Sort of like when android gets completely locked down by a carrier, you end up "rooting" the device to install custom software and enjoy the benefits of your completely free and open software ecosystem, but when apple does it, you have to throw off the chains of tyranny by jailbreaking your locked down piece of crap that nobody would ever want to buy anyway, if it weren't for the power of apple's marketing team and the weak-mindedness of sheeple.

    5. Re:Lies. by jason.sweet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're onto something.
      My Macbook Pro does get warmer when Flash is running.

    6. Re:Lies. by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Flash for the Mac is so terrible that an Adobe evangelist actually recommended using a Flash blocker in response to people's complaints about its instability. I'm not sure if Slashdotters criticizing Apple for antagonizing Adobe are aware of how slow and buggy the non-Windows version of the plugin is. Apple is eager to replace its functionality with open web standards. Adobe is so deluded that it accused Apple of being closed and of Flash being open simply because it's a commonly-installed plugin.

      Here's a John Gruber article explaining the situation between Apple and Flash better.

    7. Re:Lies. by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't know if you're aware of the Flash experience on the Mac. Flash blockers on the Mac are very common because of how slow and buggy the non-Windows version of the Flash plugin is. When Safari was released to support external process plugins, it was mentioned that the #1 cause of crashes in OS X according to their crash reporter was plugins. They didn't mention it by name, but everyone knew they were talking about Flash. It's notorious for being a piece of shit.

      Adobe has long been slow to update their core Mac applications, first for OS X and then for Cocoa. Only after Apple deprecated Carbon and cancelled the 64-bit version of it did Adobe finally update Photoshop to use Cocoa, almost a decade after OS X was first released. When a Snow Leopard update shipped with an older version of Flash than what was available because a newer version came out during their update cycle, people shit on Apple. Apple was doing Adobe a favor by shipping Flash with every Mac, but now that they're trying to push open standards like HTML5, and security issues have become a problem in Flash, why should they when a user who wants Flash can get the latest version directly from Adobe like they already do on Windows?

  2. Damned if they do, damned if they don't by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Either Apple gets a bad rep because Flash crashes or is too slow on Mac OS X (but it's not even made by Apple), because they supplied an older version (which could have been more stable, but not up-to-date) or because they stop supplying it and pointing the users to Adobe's website (which is the normal thing to do, and people will rightly associate Flash problems with Adobe, not Apple).

    No matter what they do, people will complain.

    1. Re:Damned if they do, damned if they don't by jareth-0205 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No matter what they do, people will complain.

      Yes, but also, no matter what they do, some people will defend them...

    2. Re:Damned if they do, damned if they don't by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Apple can't ship an up-to-date version of Flash. Adobe hasn't made an auto-update tool, and Apple has their computers ready to run out of the box. Once it leaves the factory, no matter what, at one point the installed Flash version is going to become outdated before the computer is even sold. Why should Apple have to carry the burden of having to install and update software from other companies?

      When users have to go to Adobe's website to install Flash, they will associate Flash with Adobe instead of Apple. So if they have Flash problems they will stop pointing at Apple as if it's their fault that Flash sucks.

      It will also help lower the supposed "Flash installed base" percentage. I don't know how they test this because I'm personally tired of hearing that "99.9% of users have Flash" when Flash sucks so bad on Mac OS X and Linux and when so many people disable or even delete Flash from their system. I even know someone who deleted Flash from his Windows 7 computer because it kept crashing his system.

      Another point is that when security lists are made for all operating systems they include software from the regular installation. If Apple drops Java and Flash they'll cut a huge percentage of security holes from their list which, frankly, is in Apple's best interest.

      As for power over the mobile Web, this isn't 1995 anymore. The mobile Web is the regular Web, if you see any difference then you're not coding using Web standards. Flash will disappear just like Shockwave disappeared. It's just a question of time.

  3. Re:So? by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One good reason would be that once everyone uses Apple's tools to write software for the Mac, they won't need to support a specific processor type. It would enable them to switch CPU architectures once again and do the jump to ARM, perhaps. Remember, that's why they "told" people to use XCode a few months before they switched to Intel. XCode has a simple "Universal Binary" checkbox which produces a PowerPC+x86 application. The next one could produce x86+ARM code before dropping x86 support altogether.

    The computing-power-to-watt ratio of ARM is much better than x86, Apple already has their own custom A4 CPU (I imagine 16-cores+ ARM CPUs for laptops and desktops), I guess their own custom ARM CPUs cost less than what Intel is charging them (per computing power units) and it would make it much simpler to write software that works on all Apple hardware in one step if the desktops and laptops switched to ARM too.

    As for the "Mac of the future", I see the general public using that model of computing while coders will still get their usual environment (you choose when first setting up the Mac). Otherwise how could we code for all the hardware?

  4. Re:So? by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't forget fanboi-ism. It's not any fun blindly bashing Apple with anyone blindly defending them.