In our new monthly column, Rik Myslewski delves deeply and geekily into all things Apple. And he’s starting off with a doozy.

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.

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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.