Apple’s official iPad promo images show working Adobe Flash plugin

See that New York Times article displayed on the iPad in the official Apple demo image to the right?

It’s called 31 Places to Go in 2010: you should click on it and check it out. When you’re done, come back and tell me what’s wrong with the iPad demo image.

Yup. Exactly so. The iPad doesn’t do Flash, but yet the New York Times’ piece contains a slideshow powered by Adobe’s plugin.

This doesn’t mean the iPad secretly runs Flash: Apple’s clearly trying to move the web away from it as a standard plugin, not just because it threatens the App Store but, as Apple themselves noted on Wednesday, the Flash plugin was responsible for more crashes reported to Apple across all of OS X than any other source.

It looks like Apple just fudged the truth a little in their iPad promo images. That’s worth a scolding cluck or two, but there’s no doubt in my mind that sites like the New York Times are already hard at work making sure all of their content works on the iPad without Flash. Not so much a fib, then, as a look at the future.

DON'T MISS
Hulu.com scrambling to be iPad-ready without Flash

[via Apple Insider]

16 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPad, News |

http://www.hoggworks.com/ Brian
A look into the future? Interesting. I would suggest that makes it false advertising. I’m not exactly sure how one makes Apple’s dickishness in this case look like a positive; I’m sure that because Apple is essentially strong-arming people into doing what they want, they’ll do what they want, so everything’s great!!!
BtotheD
Why is it strong-arming? If flash is allowed to run then people will continue to push media on what is an inferior and problematic product. News sites that still rely on flash to do their slideshows are lazy at best. Scripted slideshows are a piece of cake and load much more quickly and cleanly.
John Brownlee
How is it “false advertising?” Apple has said, straight out, the iPad doesn’t do Flash. They said it on stage during their presentation. They showed it off like it was a feature. Jobs laughed about it. All they’re saying is New York Times content will work even without Flash when the iPad is released.
I’m probably the least breathlessly pro-Apple writer on this whole site, and even I don’t think this is much more than a curiosity.
Dave
Sad to say for a fanboy like meâ€¦ but yes that video looks like a montage from 2000miles, and THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE FROM APPLE.
Now they have 2 (..3) options :
1) Implement FLASH
2) Force all the showed Press websites to trash Flash for HTML5 in 60days
3) Change that Scammy video
I love the iPad , Apple, you donâ€™t need such tricks..
http://spam.net Jizzo
…”as Apple themselves noted on Wednesday, the Flash plugin was responsible for more crashes reported to Apple across all of OS X than any other source.”
Possibly because, and yes this is reasonably true, most people at home on their computers use web and mail about 90% of the time for personal use. This includes pornography, and other poorly coded websites that take advantage of Adobe’s easy-to-use Creative Suite – in come the heavily bloated flash sites.
Also note “all of OS X”. That alone tells us that they’re counting crashes all the way back to 1999, since the inception of Apple’s first version of OS X!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
They’re also not telling us who was reporting the information “to Apple”… In my opinion, these numbers should not include any Apple staff’s error reports, as this skews the data in Apple’s favor.
http://www.grinningidiot.com JAYnLA
I’m still shocked that Jobs allowed the ‘plug in missing’ icon to appear anywhere in the presentation this week. That’s very unlike him, so I must assume that it was a conscious jab at Adobe.
shaunathan
I guess you guys are new to the internet. Before you defend Adobe for all the mean cruelness of apple, you should think to yourself how on earth did Adobe get so big? Because they strong-armed the little guy. They squashed with an iron fist everyone who had a graphics program in the early to mid 90′s. flash is a standard because they drove competition out of business.
Apple is just doing business the way adobe expects. I laugh at adobe’s plaintive cries on their press releases that complain. I don’t think either are evil, business is business.
John Anthony
shaunathan,
I guess you are new to computers. Flash was owned and started by Macromedia in 1996 and was already the standard by 1999 or 2000. Adobe didn’t buy Macromedia until 2005. Adobe didnt need to strong arm anyone, they simply were the only graphics package worth while in the early Mac days. They started Photoshop in 1988 and it quickly became the graphics standard. They didnt release a worthwhile windows version until 1993, by then graphic houses had loads of Mac hardware and the PCs were still far behind in technology. PCs had only one decent graphics software, Corel. And it was way behind Adobe in Technology, and most importantly compatibility with Graphics houses.
But anyway, Flash was a standard LONG before Adobe acquired it. Heck even Quark express didnt get a competitive product form Adobe until 1996, and Quark is still very standard with desktop pros. Dreamweaver, also a Macromedia product, was also a standard well before Adobe bought them
http://ObamaPacman.com ObamaPacman
Apple didn’t advertise flash support.
For all you know it can be HTML5 video.
MMNW
The first thing I noticed, is that the advertising banner on top and on the right is missing (both are flash in browser).
So, as far as I know, the nytimes is generating some special iPad version of it’s site without Flash. It’s way more probable for the nytimes to go with HTML5 than Apple with Flash.
Chris
I think the most obvious reason for this is because promotional images aren’t true photographs. They’re heavily edited. The webpage being displayed is probably a screen capture from OS X Safari put onto the tablet.
Taking a straight photograph of a LCD screen wouldn’t make the product look that good.
nacra
Come on, have some vision.
Flash sucks, always has. It’s only as ubiquitous as it is because it was first and the only game in town. It’s time to move on with an open source alternative. Why should Apple contribute to what should be a dying standard?
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-6470-San-Jose-Gadgets-Examiner~y2010m1d27-Obama-to-read-SOTU-address-off-of-an-iPad Robert Mullins
Isn’t that like Ford putting a Chevrolet engine in one of its cars and saying, “see how much faster this Ford runs than a Chevy?”
Robyn
New York Times…. a company of JOURNALISTS can do a Flash replacement right, and yet Adobe (a software company) can’t get things in order with Flash.
Losing respect for Adobe….
Benji
If Apple is making misleading mockups of webpages so that it looks like Flash works with its iPad then this is absolutely false advertising – there is no question about it. Apple does not disclose anywhere that the iPad won’t run Flash because they are trying to fool people into buying the iPad. They are trying to pretend it is great for movie watching but it is only 4:3. iLame
Robert
Pointless article. I have no problem viewing the travel site on my IPOD touch.
Give it a try if you have an Iphone/ipod touch.