some random title.

You may even be right, but i think Apple is now at the stage where Jobs is doing far more bad than good, and really wants to be pushed.

I probably wont buy another apple product until they do. Dont particularly care about the Linux/Windows thing. I use both. I am old enough not to give a Damn about the politics of that particular argument.

However, Jobs seems to be far too combatative. Not just Adobe, but their independant developers also regularly feel a Jobsian toungue-lashing ("No, you cant put that in the App store. No were not going to tell you why."). I've worked for bosses like that. I didnt like it much then either.

There really must be a shedload of profit for Iphone apps that do pass the Jobsian Gestapo, because i have no idea why independant developers would otherwise want to develop for it.

Your correct in that the average granny doesnt give a toss about such things, but I do. Ah well.

C'est la Vie.

Open standards... where?

How is any of this about open standards if Apple has gone to incredible effort to lock down its IPhone/Pad platforms? There are death row inmates that have more freedom of expression than IPhone app developers. Additionally, there is all this talk of openness and a patent pool at the same time. Clearly, the point of this patent pool is a gathering to find grounds to engage in legal action opposed to protecting their legal ground from action. I want to say this all my Apple-hating cult-defying bias except that Apple did put out a HTML5 demo page that is all about this openness, but was in fact not open.

This talk of openness in the context of Apple's conduct and business direction seems more than an ethical accident and rather a blatant lie. Honestly, I am absolutely astonished people are still drinking from the Apple punch at this stage in the game. If Apple were really about openness they would allow Flash on their platforms and provide their user's a method to disable Flash that is engaged by default. They would also not publish open standard demo pages that are anything but open, as well as a host of other openness defying behaviors.

I'm better than anyone who likes an Apple product.

I'm better than anyone who likes an Apple product.

are you Steve Jobs in disguise?

Seriously though... you need to get your head out of your arse... there is a valid point being raised here if you put the Apple/Adobe shite aside - HTML5...

The problem with these so called "standards" is that they really aren't, a lot is left to the interpretation of various vendors (no surprise there as they are behind the whole shebang), and we have the current situation where each vendor has its own interpretation of the "vague" parts of the standard.

The W3C needs to man up here, and remove any vagaries from the standard, constraining vendors to specific technologies - of course this will never happen, if they did the vendors will go away and no cushy jobs at the W3C...

The situation will be worse than when the original HTML specs came out, at least then you had the IE way of doing things and the Mosaic way of doing things, now we're going to have Safari/Chrome/Mozilla/IE/Opera, each purporting to support standards but in reality, it's their own interpretation of the standards. End result, miserable lives for web developers, so in reality, they are not better off...

Who cares about developers, it's the end user experience that matters I hear you say... This type attitude really is bollocks, innovation will suffer as developers will have to focus instead on getting consistency across platforms, so it will be the end user that suffers long term... And what's going to happen, well Adobe (or something similar) will release a product which will work consistently across all browsers..

oh wait...

HTML5 = EPIC FAIL

Ignore the ranting types, they'll get bored eventually...

"and if they manage to move the web to open standards where everyone wins, hooyah!"

You have a point about the fanboy subset of commenters, but it seems you've taken something very different from this article than I did. I can see how it might appear to be a sop to the anti-Apple posters, but the main thing I took from it is an interpretation of the ongoing Apple/Adobe spat over Flash and the protracted "open standards" conversation as a potentially huge threat to Apple's brand and reputation.

I'm not a big fan of Apple chiefly down to their support offerings, but I can recognise what they do well and why they're exceptionally popular amongst their target markets. I've heard this variously characterised as "focused on user experience" or "selling a complete package", but they clearly offer something to the end-user that rival vendors don't. That's a compelling USP and one that I can easily respect regardless of personal preferences.

Shifting the focus of the conversation to something like "open standards" when a large part of Apple's success with the user-experience aspect of their products has been specifically down to retaining as much control over their platforms as possible is a recipe for disaster. Talk about "open standards" will inevitably lead people to discuss associated topics like open-source software and peer review. At which point certain uncomfortable issues will crop up, including:

the seemingly-arbitrary nature of some App Store rules and their enforcement (well within Apple's rights in terms of protecting their platform and branding, but not particularly "open" in the sense usually used in the context of "open standards" or "open source";

their approach to fixing security issues such as the long-standing and baffling drive-by-download issue in Safari on OS X (which won't fare well in discussions about the benefits of open source software);

the existence of non-Apple software that also conforms to the open standards in question, while also being open source;

the spate of suicides at Foxconn's factory (widely described as an "iPhone factory" and thus something that, fairly or otherwise, will likely be blamed on Apple rather than Foxconn)

I'm not for one second suggesting that all of these are relevant to the discussion - but that's not the point. The point is that moving the conversation away from the Apple focus on user-experience and towards open-standards (which pretty much requires comparisons between products and companies) suddenly opens Apple up to a bunch of criticisms that can't easily be dismissed.

It's kind of hard to get level-headed discussion on this sort of thing at the minute, because almost all internet discussion about Apple seems to be polarised. But whether you like Apple or not, it has to be pretty straightforward to see it's not a good idea for Apple's head honcho to spend a bunch of time publicly reframing the discussion of Apple's products away from what they do well (user experience and selling a complete package) and towards something they don't do so well (open source/standards).

Put down the crack pipe

What does market cap and making a profit have to do with a criticism of Steve Jobs and his personal obsession with killing off Flash or his psychotic compulsion to prevent people from having rights over the contents of the devices they purchase? If you like Apple and it's products, good for you. But this article doesn't really point out anything that isn't readily apparent to those following the tech industry as a whole. Jobs and Apple have a well-documented history that lines up (mostly) with the claims and statements of the article.

Also, what fucking planet are you from, to think that people on this site are so enamored with Window$ and Micro$haft that they display the same idiotic thinking about MS that you so clearly do about Apple? You're definitely NOT reading that here. I'm certain that El Reg can count on one hand the number of MS homers on this site.

The sound you hear is reality passing you by.

What is iPad?

Do you think the Grannie who just bought an iPad knows anything of the HTML5 war?

No, the Grannie wonders why a Lego brick has replaced the content on lots of web pages, why here favourite website is missing half of it's content and what is this Adobe Flash thing?

Take it from me, I have both an iPad and a Grannie and have tried them together.

Whilst forcing Standards upon people is sometimes the only way to change luddites, If it's at the cost of a large percentage of the web's content not working it's not a good option and will only result in lots of returns of the product.

What is iPad? A way of removing £700 quid from people with waaaaaay too much money.

I want a Grannie Icon please.

Hmmm...

...Apple fanboys aren't what they used to be, the effort to make a coherent arguement seems to have escaped this one entirely.

What a well reasoned counter-argument

by the commentor above... Seriously, with fanbois like this Stevey can pretty much do as he pleases because they will lap up and promote any partly digested stuff he throws. The point is that Apple have set in place the positive feedback loop between more users and more quality apps and content that is hard to break. The only thing that can stop them is competitors who get their act together and make something compelling... These tech forum articles and comments can do little against whatever Apple chooses to do, notwithstanding walled garden and standards violations.

Stop yer whinging...

...el Reg is an equal-opportunity tech basher, and Gavin's name got drawn from the hat to be fanboi Andrew's counterpoint.

WillLondon ...

OK and breathe...

I think you have missed a lot of the pretty good points made in this article by just blowing it all as soon as something slightly critical of Apple's approach appears.

At present, Apple is doing more harm towards the creation of a universally adopted platform agnostic HTML5 standard than is good for all of us in the longer term than any of the other browser vendors. They are behaving like Microsoft did in the 90s when a slew of proprietary IE extensions left us with the web we still have lingering on today.

And everybody is a loser if that happens again, sadly.

@Kappie save a something

Hmmm, what does market cap and making a profit have to do with the article? What does it have to do with cool is more what you should be asking, because that's the whole point of the article. The point made is that it is a bit silly to declare Apple uncool when people are flocking to its products in record numbers. Yeah, really uncool company. I think the ones who think Apple is uncool are a small and vocal minority that believe everything they read and feel they know SJ better than their own mothers.

Now, perhaps, it's you who should put the crack pipe down (and pass it this way<grin>).

RE: Open standards... where?

"How is any of this about open standards if Apple has gone to incredible effort to lock down its IPhone/Pad platforms?"

Flash != open.

"There are death row inmates that have more freedom of expression than IPhone app developers."

That's completely right. Now take your medication before we're forced to tie your arms behind your back. Yes, there are applications that are not allowed on the iPhone/iPod but these are a tiny minority (less than 0.1%) and there are also things that are not allowed (code interpreting) but this is a valid way of preserving the quality of the user experience. Developers who can code in C/C++/ Java are not affected at all...

"Apple did put out a HTML5 demo page that is all about this openness, but was in fact not open."

Yes they did a mistake on their part. It is HTML5 though - just change your browsers identifying ID and every HTML5 compatible browser will work just fine ;)

RE: I'm better than anyone who likes an Apple product.

Well, you've certainly wasted less money on useless tat. Whether that makes you a better person, I couldn't say.

Re: AC @ 11:14

Never said that Apple was or wasn't cool, but sure as hell didn't overreact to an article that can be found in spades across the whole of the Internet. The whole point of the article, pretty clearly, was about the negative impact that Steve Jobs (and his psycho tendencies) is finally having on the perception of Apple and its products. Do you even understand what reading comprehension is? WTF?

You can gladly have the crack pipe all to yourself. And it would still greatly behoove you to get a solid dose of reality for a change. Apple has made a dramatic comeback from the verge of irrelevance, only for Jobs to become to big for his britches. Don't you remember the 1984 commercial? Apple was the anti-establishment computer company. Now what are they? Big Brother. So put that in your crack pipe and smoke it.

Irony is best served cold with coleslaw and chips

This article cracks me up - today, with my 1.6GHz Core Duo laptop and 4G RAM, my laptop that is fast enough to handle any damn thing - it took Firefox 3.6.3 exactly 40 seconds to completely load The Reg's home page - YES, I timed it, damn it, just so you could read it here!

WHY did it take so damned long? Because of all the FLASH on the right-hand side of The Reg's home page, specifically something from legolas-media(dot)com stalled loading the page for 25 seconds.

And I completely agree with WilliamLondon. Apple's competitors are upset? Well, gee, Apple MUST be doing something RIGHT then, huh?

Flash has become bulky, clunky, cumbersome - and unstable.

Grannie?

"Do you think the Grannie who just bought an iPad knows anything of the HTML5 war?"

Grannies don't buy iPads. Trendy twats with far too much money buy them to use as toys. Check the demographics.

Journalists love to neglect details...

> Why do people always bang on about these "Grannies who just bought an iPad"? Has anybody > actually met one?

Granny has to set her wifi up first.

Then she needs to have a copy of iTunes running on a regular PC to activate and manage the iPad with.

Liberty vs. Tyranny

It doesn't matter if Flash is open or not. I should be at liberty to use it and disable it as I see fit.

It isn't about how good or bad the choice is but the fact that I am free to make it and don't have something rammed down my throat by some corporation that undoubtedly is only looking out for it's own financial interests.

Are you really naieve enough to trust an American corporation to do the right thing?

Sheeple consumers will always be fleeced.

> This article cracks me up - today, with my 1.6GHz Core Duo laptop and 4G RAM,

> my laptop that is fast enough to handle any damn thing - it took Firefox 3.6.3 exactly

> 40 seconds to completely load The Reg's home page - YES, I timed it, damn it, just

> so you could read it here!

Like I said. You have the freedom to choose how much you buy into this flash nonsense.

If El Reg is taking 40 seconds to load it's only because you allow it to.

40 secs!

40 secs, what else is running, it took less than 3 secs on my (single core) intel 2.13GHz 1Gb Dell inspiron which is around 7 years old. I'm also connected to a remote network via citrix, listening to music via SPotify and also doing a complete rebuild/unit test of a huge software base, so both my internet connection and machine is busy.

[troll]Of course I am running on linux[/troll]

Grannies?

I don't know how many will actually want an iPad, but I would imagine there would be a few who, if given such a thing, would ask why it doesn't display the web pages that they can view perfectly well on their PC (be it a box with Windows installed on it or whatever) properly, because of Apple's edict to ban flash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to "cream my pants when I think of Bill Gates" (ew), and really I couldn't give a crap either way about Apple. I've never found the need to spend my money on any of their devices, but many have.

I just think your straw man argument about grannies and your ad-hominem attack on users of anything that isn't Apple are rather puerile, and, quite frankly, I have heard them before a number of times. The amount of bile you seem to be spouting at anyone who doesn't appear to like Apple as much as you is in truth rather sad. At the end of the day, they're only consumer devices and if they are that important to you, I'd suggest that maybe you are missing out on other, more important, aspects of a full and well-rounded social life.

@BillG

Which is why I have AdBlock and NoScript installed on FF. I suspect the flash adverts I'm not seeing are being blocked by the first, since there is no grey place holder there that I would otherwise have to click on to see the flash content.

You see, I have the choice about whether or not I can see this, because for all of Windows' failings, it does at least allow me a fairly decent amount of control over my own property (or in this case, my employer's property).

And FYI, I am using an XP box with a dual core P4 2.8 Ghz and a measly gigabyte of RAM. I just timed how long it took to open FF3.6.3 to open up and load the Reg's home page and it was a smidge under five seconds, most of which was taken up by loading the app from disk, by the sounds of it. If, as you say, the page styalled loading because of the Flash content, I would suggest that it is the CONTENT that slowed you down - perhaps something to do with having to download the video content of an advert over your internet connection. Would this be any quicker with HTML4? I doubt it.

But then you 'completely agree with WilliamLondon' so would appear to be living in a parallel universe where logic was dropped on its head as a child.

'fess up

If it was a phone you were after, you wouldn't use an iPhone, because as a mobile telephone, it's one of the worst on the market. The sound quality is poor, its antenna is poor and it randomly drops calls.

RE: 'fess up

"If it was a phone you were after, you wouldn't use an iPhone, because as a mobile telephone, it's one of the worst on the market. The sound quality is poor, its antenna is poor and it randomly drops calls."

Mine has great sound quality compared to the Motorola I had previously, it's never dropped any calls either. Maybe the antenna isn't as poor as you think?

@Daren

Odd, haven't had those issues (except for one point with lousy coverage, had the same issue with all phones there). Reception does get worse after reading some articles on good ol' El Reg, but that's mostly after I I don my tinfoil hat :-)

@Kode. Well...

I'm using CS5 on a new Mac Pro, and I'm happy. I couldn't really care if Adobe ports CS5 to the Commodore PET, Sinclair Spectrum or re-writes it for the Z80 or anything else.

As long as I've got what I'm happy with, I don't care where else they market/apply it..

And yes, I've been a techie for over 35 years now (and 22 years of being Mac only) , so I've seen at least as much change as you - probably more - and no, I'm not overly happy with the Apple-Adobe war that's broken out, nor do I agree with Mr Jobs' diatribe against Adobe/Flash.

However, I still think Leopard>Win7, and Mac>Dell (or anything else), so that's the way I go.

Running off with invective against Apple and issuing pointless statements like "...and actually have wished that Adobe would make their products pc-only. .." give you all the appearance of a sour-grapes, petulant child or a rejected lover, which I'm sure isn't true.

You also claim "...I've seen him spread the lies for past 16 years..."

Is this just child-like invective, or can you supply definitive unequivocal examples, please?

Techie <cough>bollocks<cough>

Point 1

you are by your own admision a fanboi, therefore de facto a NON techie. You are a consumer.

Point 2 _any_ genuine techie with 35 years experience would know full well that the speccy infact did use a Z80 chip. So if cs5 was ported to the spectrum it would not then need to be re written in Z80 code as that would have been a_fairly_important part of porting it to the speccy in the first place.

hint - if you want to look like a techie - wiki things first. wiki may be lagley bollocks, but it's a damn sight more clued up than you (see points one and two)

usual arrogant crap from a know-it-all (who doesn't)..

I was a techie with Burroughs Machines in the early eighties - pre Unisys days - and linked Burroughs (i.e. re-badged Convergent Technologies) micros with Burroughs minis & IBM minis etc.

Funnily enough, we found very few Spectrums used commercially, so I confess a) I never used one and b) I don't know what they were built from, and c) I did not care the, and care even less now. So the guy who fixes our car (and does it very well) isn't a REAL mechanic if he doesn't know the jet needle for a 1937 Morris?

You say "..you are by your own admision a fanboi, therefore de facto a NON techie..."

Pure sophistry - or, if you're unsure what sophistry is, let me rephrase it in the vernacular.

Pure bollocks.

Anyway, in your rush to prove your uber-knowledge (sad, really) of archaic toys, you completely lost the meaning of my post which was to say that I really don't give a damn if Adobe port CS5 to any OS with more than 2 surviving machines, so Kodes desire to stop Adobe producing Mac software was little more than childish petulance

I think your egotistical implication that you are clued up is little more than wishful thinking.

Perhaps you could get out more. English comprehension classes, possibly?