14 DAY TRIAL // New reports have emerged saying Steve Jobs is keen on convincing partners to ditch Flash. The Apple CEO is notoriously a hater of the technology, citing crashes on Mac OS X as being mostly due to Flash. The company doesn’t plan on supporting Flash altogether on the iPad, something that was obvious ever since Jobs’ keynote presentation in January. However, never has the Apple CEO been so vocal on the matter, as when he sat down with select Wall Street Journal staff on the third floor of the News Corporation building in New York as part of a broader media tour, Gawker reveals.
Gawker Media, one of the most successful blog-oriented media companies, cites people familiar with the matters discussed at this meeting as saying that, “Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash [...] He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy. But he also called Flash a ‘CPU hog,’ a source of ‘security holes’ and [...] a dying technology.” According to the same people, Jobs said of Flash, “We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology,” throwing in a comparison between Flash and other obsolete systems that died at the hands of Apple.
Jobs reportedly went on to claim that, “The iPad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash,” Gawker has been told.
Softpedia note
To be noted that Gawker Media doesn’t find this account crucial in Mr. Jobs’ decision of leaving out Flash from the iPad and everything running the iPhone OS. Had the software been less of a CPU hog, it surely wouldn’t have undergone such scrutiny from Apple. Basically, this is the main reason why Apple doesn’t want Flash on its portables. Sure, it’s buggy on a Mac, but it’s there, isn’t it? Had it been only buggy on the iPad, we’d say that Jobs’ demonstration of the iPad’s web-browsing capabilities would have included a playable video on the NY Times website.
Ditching Flash would be easy as pie, Jobs reportedly said during his meeting with the people at The WSJ, suggesting the newspaper used the H.264 video compression system. Jobs reportedly said the Journal would find "It's trivial to create video in H.264&rdfquo; instead of Flash, according to Gawker media.