Steve Jobs: Flash Video Would Make the iPad Battery Life 1.5 Hours

[wraggster]

According to Steve Jobs, running Flash video on the iPad would cut its battery life from 10 hours to a measly 1.5. At least, that was his pitch to Wall Street Journal execs recently. But could it possibly be true?

Well, yes and no. Jobs is picking and choosing here between hypothetical versions of Flash. If the iPad version of Flash were to have hardware acceleration, which Flash 10.1 offered up for desktops (though not OS X), that wouldn't be remotely the case. If Flash on the iPad were to support hardware video decoding where available, it wouldn't require nearly as much CPU. You'd lose battery life, sure, the same way you lose battery life watching any type of video on any system, but nothing near as dramatic as 85%.

Of course, that hardware acceleration isn't currently possible on Macs, because Adobe doesn't have access to the appropriate APIs. So Jobs can easily on a imaginary version of Flash that doesn't have hardware acceleration and come up with an imaginary battery life impact.

Jobs's bigger fib might be his description of ditching Flash as "trivial." It's not. While HTML5 is good, it's not great—yet. And even when it becomes great, it'll take major sites years to make the switch—however long it takes for the majority of internet users to stop using outmoded browsers. And that won't be for a very long time. Certainly longer than the first few generations of the iPad.

So. Would Flash make the iPad's battery life only 1.5 hours? Maybe, maybe not. But the bigger question is: will we ever get the chance to find out for ourselves?

http://gizmodo.com/5475005/steve-job...-life-15-hours

[symbal]

Put your hands up if you gonna buy one of these things... now while they up slap some sense into yourself because this thing is all style over substance and there is far better options.

[darkriku2000]

Man, this is a load of bull. Everybody knows that the only reason that apple won't allow flash on any of it's portable devices (can the iPad even be considered portable?) is because that would open the way to tons of free flash games and videos, plus shows with things like hulu, making iTunes pretty much useless for anything other than music.

[b8a]

Man, this is a load of bull. Everybody knows that the only reason that apple won't allow flash on any of it's portable devices (can the iPad even be considered portable?) is because that would open the way to tons of free flash games and videos, plus shows with things like hulu, making iTunes pretty much useless for anything other than music.

That's an interesting theory, but it completely ignores the fact that Safari can already pretty much do anything that Flash can, the major difference is that the web is already loaded with Flash-ready content. And the only thing standing in the way of Flash-less games and video is the reluctance of the public to upgrade from Internet Explorer to more progressive browsers. If that should ever happen Apple would have such an awful job of yanking that support from Safari that this theory can't hold any real water.

On top of that, Flash _IS_ inarguably an inefficient lumbering resource hog, so Jobs has perfectly legitimate grounds for being stubborn about this. The only thing that's frustrating about this is how Jobs keeps on degrading the argument into childish sound bites. Well, that and the fact that he's so obsessed with presenting us with a flawless user experience that he won't even let us opt-in to technologies that even my twelve-year-old mac (which is less powerful than an iPhone) can handle.

[symbal]

Everyone has to understand how Apple designs it's products, just like on Iphone they deliberately restrict basic features on the device so people will have to upgrade to the replacement model because they realise they can't do what they need.