Apple’s hissy catfight with Adobe over the future of Flash on the web has reached storied proportion at this point, with Apple claiming that Flash is buggy and slow and Adobe… well… not so much saying otherwise as whining about the unfairness of it all.
Given Apple’s strong feelings about Flash, it’s hard not to give perhaps undue importance to word that the new MacBook Airs are actually shipping without Adobe Flash pre-installed… even though it’s been preloaded on all of Apple’s past hardware.
This may mean nothing. Tons of Windows machines don’t ship with Flash preinstalled, and it was just a couple of weeks ago that Steve Ballmer and Adobe were in secret talks to discuss a unified front against the threat posed to the two businesses by Apple.
That all said, Steve Jobs has been unequivocal: HTML5 is the future of video and interactive content on the web, not Flash. He’s also very strongly stated that the MacBook Air is Apple’s vision for the future of notebooks. Is it so hard to believe that when the iOS-like OS X 10.7 finally gets spit down the pipeline, Apple will have banished Flash from their whole product lineup?
[via Engadget]
