Apple may be the world’s most secretive consumer products company. And when facts are few, mere speculation roils a sea of hyperbole. You need someone to dive beneath its turbulent surface and fetch pearls of reality. Beginning this month, I’m signing on as your diver.
And it’s a good month to dive in, considering the steaming soup of disinformation and misdirection that is the ongoing imbroglio of Steve Jobs versus Adobe’s Flash. The skrimish shines a spotlight on the competition between Flash and HTML5’s <video> tag, the open web video standard that Jobs prefers over Flash.
Jobs famously called Flash a “CPU hog.” Well, yes and no. Yes, Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor will show that Flash-encrusted web pages cause Safari to chew up CPU cycles. But no, HTML5 by itself is no savior--at least, according to testing performed by the video-encoding wizard Jan Ozer of the Streaming Learning Center. What matters is hardware acceleration--which is one reason why Flash performs better on Windows than it does on a Mac. And when Ozer tested the upcoming Flash 10.1, which enables GPU acceleration, Flash handily spanked HTML5. But only on Windows.
On the Mac, Flash 10.1 isn’t scheduled to enable hardware acceleration because the programming hooks (or APIs, which stands for application programming interfaces) that are necessary for it were only introduced in Mac OS 10.6.3, released in late March. Also, Apple only provides APIs for decoding video, not displaying it. For that, Adobe is on its own.
But these hardware-acceleration APIs are for the Mac, not the iPhone/Pod/Pad’s upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 (which, by the way, needs a new name). It’s on these mobile devices that Jobs & Co. are betting the company--and it’s from them that Flash is forbidden. Jobs says that when running on mobile devices, Flash’s software-based decoder egregiously sucks power when wrestling with H.264 video. Interestingly, there are no hardware-acceleration hooks into the iPhone/Pod/Pad’s PowerVR SGX graphics guts, which were designed by Imagination Technologies, a company in which Cupertino is heavily invested. However, Imagination has another mobile offering, the PowerVR VXD, which does decode H.264 in hardware, but Apple hasn’t chosen to use it…that I know of. Imagination won’t tell me--not that I blame them, knowing how Apple feels about secrecy.
Jobs has also said that he prefers HTML5 to Flash because HTML5 is an open standard. Had I first read that statement at the breakfast table, my subsequent guffaw would have caused nuggets of Count Chocula to rocket out of my nose. Apple is the poster child for tightly controlled, closed systems. The iPhone OS developer license, for example, disallows any app that would “install or launch other executable code by any means”--an edict that keeps Flash, Java, and other executables off the iPhone/Pod/Pad. But it gets worse: when Apple announced iPhone OS 4.0, it beefed up that proscription to require that all apps be “originally written in Objective-C, C, C++” and not translated from another language into native code for Apple’s mobile devices.
This escalation eviscerates Adobe CS5’s Packager for iPhone, which translates ActionScript 3 projects into native iPhone/Pod/Pad apps. How the new edict will affect multiplatform languages such as haXe or multiplatform translators such as Appcelerator is unknown, although Apple may let them slide since they use Apple’s APIs, while Adobe's Packager produces low-level native code.
Perhaps Steve’s real beef with translated apps is that they can be made available to many devices--Windows Phone 7 and Android smartphones, webOS slates from HP, whatever--and he’d prefer not to share his developers. And then there’s the small matter of Flash games and videos tending to be free, which is hardly a good way to encourage you to spend money in iTunes--although Apple claims that the App Store and iTunes Store are merely “break even“ businesses designed to sell hardware, not make a profit.
But divining Apple’s motives is mere speculation. And that’s not what I signed on for.
--
Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.
MatthewF
August 11, 2010 at 4:37pm
"And it's a good month to dive in... Steve Jobs vs. Adobe's Flash."
Which month was that, February? March?
"On the Mac, Flash 10.1 isn’t scheduled to enable hardware acceleration..."
Shame that you -- or more specifically your editor -- missed today's news invalidating the entire paragraph and the one following.
"Perhaps Steve’s real beef with translated apps is that they can be made available to many devices..."
Well, yes, that's what he actually specifically said. Apps written in a cross-platform technology must always utilize nothing greater than the lowest common denominator of the combined platforms, resulting in OS and hardware functionality being retarded if the cross-platform technology becomes popular enough. You have read what Steve's actually said about this, haven't you?
"But divining Apple’s motives is mere speculation. And that’s not what I signed on for."
Why then did you spend the entire column doing so? No, seriously, how can this sentence make any sense in light of an entire column full of speculation about Apple's motives, with a headline of "What's really behind Apple's war on Adobe Flash?" No, really, I want to know, what can you possibly mean?
Darwin1977
August 11, 2010 at 3:48pm
I was not at all surprised after reading this terrible article that the writer works for the register. The register regularly hosts uninformed, immature, and foolish commentary on Apple. They are having a hissy because Apple doesn't invite them to conferences you see.
This article is indicative of so many web based articles where the subject line is written first and then the rest of the story around the subject. The subject is there as link bait and page view bait.
What the author never mentions but undoubtedly knows is that Flash is a resource hog, is unstable, and a security sieve. Yet he barely mentions the resource issues except to discount it based on some nebulous comparison with HTML 5. Which tells me he knows nothing about video in HTML 5 or is pretending not to.
The he trots out Adobes standard lame excuse for why Flash on the Mac has been garbage for years which won't fly to anyone who actually knows something about the subject.
He is also laughingly wrong about how video acceleration works with the iPhone 4 and iPad. Do some research or will facts interfere with your narrative?
HTML 5 is an open standard and Apple adheres to plenty of open standards and has supported them by releasing an extensive amount of code to open source. Like webkit which is only the basis for most of the current web browsers out there including Google Chrome.
The author also needs to learn what "translated apps" really are because his paragraph on this subject is a mish mash of nonsensical sentences.
Apple doesn't want flash apps because they are free? Puh-lease. You really ran out of ideas with that one.
I think much less of Mac Life for publishing this drivel and hiring this guy. You got my page view this time but not again.
derekamoss
August 11, 2010 at 10:50am
How long ago was this article written lol?
"But these hardware-acceleration APIs are for the Mac, not the iPhone/Pod/Pad’s upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 (which, by the way, needs a new name)."
iOS 4.0 is already out.
"On the Mac, Flash 10.1 isn’t scheduled to enable hardware acceleration because the programming hooks (or APIs, which stands for application programming interfaces) that are necessary for it were only introduced in Mac OS 10.6.3, released in late March.'
They enabled it just yesterday.
