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Want Flash Player On a MacBook Air? Download It Yourself
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.'"
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.
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.
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.