Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

lol

both flash, and html5, fail in seperating content from presentation.

it's a step backwards.

Being held hostage by Adobe

Can't say that I blame Jobs for not wanting to wait (weeks? months?) on Adobe to release flash player updates for Mac after they've released the ones for Windows platforms, of course.

A few home truths

I am so tired of hearing (and replying to) Apple hating bigots... Here are some facts:

The vast majority of apps that Flash could replace are free on the App Store.

Free apps on the App Store cost Apple as much to review and host as paid apps.

Apple LOSE money by hosting free apps on the app store.

There are way more downloads of free apps than paid apps.

The app store turns a small profit for Apple not the vast riches some people think it does.

Apple make their money by selling the Phone and the App Store is a major selling point.

A developer gets 75% of what is charged for his app which is a huge return.

There are now 160,000 apps on the app store.

A vast majority of those 160,000 apps are pretty crap and are free.

Free Flash apps are in general also pretty crap... and its hard for a developer to make money except by making Flash adverts.

If not having Flash on the iPhone was such a huge deal breaker then the iPhone would be a complete financial failure.

If not having Flash on the iPhone was such a huge deal breaker then iPhone users would be totally dissatisfied with what they have bought and would not be considering replacing their iPhones with another iPhone.

The only people that really care about having Flash on their phone are free to buy some other companies product.

Flash don't work on Linux

Why is Flash the _only_ video player on my machines that can't play full screen video without dropping more frames than a glazing factory during a magnitude 9.8 earthquake? What do all the other players like Mplayer and VLC do right that Flash can't?

Huh

"Flash not a CPU hog", says agency whose core business involves, oh, wait, Flash video. In any case, the point about Adobe's recent optimizations is immaterial; the most basic media players have played video on lightweight systems for years and years, under Windows and Linux, using the same codecs and same bitrates without the NEED for hardware acceleration. As loathe as I am to agree with Jobs, Adobe's implementation has been historically inefficient.

Ommitting part of the problem

Part of the problem is that the comparison of CPU usage seems to have only compared the CPU usage of Flash video which uses the H.264 video codec. Why doesn't this compare HTML5 to the significant majority of Flash video on the web which used the proprietary Adobe Flash video codec as well? Of course Adobe should be capable of equaling the performance of HTML5 with Flash when exclusively looking at H.264 video content considering it is essentially playing the same thing. A key question is why both having Adobe Flash involved at all to play a video codec that can be played properly without having any proprietary software / technology used as a wrapper.

"efficient"??

X with hardware acceleration is more efficient than X without hardware acceleration.

Um.

I don't think that's a valid claim unless you replace "more efficient than" with "faster than", in which case you have a tautology.

Any algorithm will be faster under hardware acceleration, regardless of how efficient it is.

This test was meaningless

This test misrepresented Jobs' claims, and thus produced irrelevant results.

Jobs said that Flash was responsible for the vast majority of web browser crashes, not Mac OS crashes. This is not just possible, but likely.

Jobs said that Flash was a CPU/resource hog. He said Flash, not just Flash playing h.264 video. It is obvious, but irrelevant, that playing h.264 video efficiently comes down to CODEC performance, which requires hardware acceleration to be CPU efficient. But to support Flash, you have to not only support h.264 video (which is very rarely used in Flash), but the full range of Flash scripted interaction, and of course all of the older CODECs. And that is what consumes CPU and RAM that makes Flash suck battery/CPU/RAM. To disprove this you would need to run a wide range of interactive Flash apps, and try to prove that none of them are slow or bloated. Or you could try to prove that Flash Lite is not only efficient but runs all Flash on the internet. Good luck with that.

Jobs' actual claim was that to support the full range of Flash on the web, the iPad would have to have the CPU and RAM of a desktop computer, at which point it would cost much more and have a much shorter battery life, and would on top of that be less stable (because Flash is unstable). So his interactive media strategy is to support h.264 video, and JavaScript/HTML5, which are well defined and can be optimized to run efficiently and reliably.