Holier-than-thou, an adjective, meaning “marked by an air of superior piety or morality”. Everybody has moments in their life where they get into a “holier-than-thou” attitude, and I think Steve Jobs’ open letter regarding Adobe, and Flash in particular, really fits the bill. There are three specific points I want to address to illustrate just how holier-than-thou, hypocritical, and misleading this letter really is.
Jobs’ letter contains a lot of good points. Flash is indeed a very problematic piece of software; its performance is terrible (although 10.1 improves this), it’s riddled with security issues, and it’s highly unstable. It crashes a lot, eats CPU, and to boot, opens up your machine to all sorts of security nastiness. To make matters worse, it’s proprietary and not a web standard in the true sense of the word.
That being said, Jobs’ letter is incredibly two-faced, hypocritical, and very misleading. It’s clearly a marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers, and while that’s okay (they’re in it to make money, after all), it’s our job to remove that wool from our eyes. Just as we geeks immediately understand Microsoft’s ulterior motive in licensing patents to Linux/Android vendors, we should not just accept Jobs’ words either.
There are three points I wish to address specifically to illustrate just how hypercritical the letter is: Carbon, H264, and iTunes on Windows (or iTunes’ non-existence on Linux). The order is entirely random, and there’s no deeper meaning behind it.
Carbon
In his letter, Jobs derided Adobe for not adopting new technologies quick enough, pointing specifically towards how long it has taken Adobe to leave Carbon behind. It wasn’t until the recently released Creative Suite version 5.0 that Adobe switched its applications over to Cocoa. Considering how old Cocoa is, it’s indeed about time.
But then, why did it take Apple so many years to transition the prime Mac OS X application, the Finder, to Cocoa? The Cocoa variant of the Finder shipped with Snow Leopard, which was released August 28, 2009. To make matters worse – iTunes still hasn’t been re-written in Cocoa, and is still shipping in all its 32bit Carbon goodness.
You could argue that surely, iTunes has no benefit from switching to Carbon and 64bit, and I’ll grant you that one. However, Apple has one massive application that is still fully Carbon and 32bit, an application that is very similar in scope to Adobe’s product offerings: Final Cut Pro is still written in Carbon, and is still 32bit. In other words, it’s okay for Apple to neglect Cocoa for Final Cut Pro, but it’s not okay for Adobe to take their time.
I think the prime reason it is taking/has taken both Adobe and Apple so long to transition these massively complex applications over to Cocoa is quite a simple one: it’s really hard. These aren’t Chess or TextEdit we’re talking about, people – we’re looking at what is probably a massive amount of complicated code.
It’s not just Adobe that has taken its sweet time to transition to Cocoa. Microsoft Office:Mac 2008 is also written in Carbon, and heck, even Apple itself is still in the middle of transitioning to Cocoa.
H264
We’ve talked about this on OSNews in quite some detail already. H264 is no better than Flash. This video codec is proprietary and patented up the wazzoo, and therefore, wholly incompatible with the very concept of an open standard. To make matters much, much worse, the licensing body that oversees H264, the MPEG-LA, has stated in no uncertain terms that they will not hesitate to sue ordinary users for using the video codec.
Why, then, is Apple, in a letter full of talk of openness and standards, promoting this closed codec, a codec that will once again shackle the web to a proprietary technology, just as we’re busy breaking free from Flash? The answer is easy: follow the money.
Apple is part of the MPEG-LA, as is Microsoft. This means that the more people license H264, the more money Apple and Microsoft get, since their patents are in the patent pool. Steve Jobs might go all starry-eyed and gush about how much Apple believes in open standards and the open web, but just as with any other company – Adobe, Microsoft – this support ends where Apple’s wallet begins.
That is the sole reason why they’re promoting H264, disguising it as a web standard. As you can see, I can get very worked up over this. At least when Microsoft is talking about standards, everybody knows it’s out of self-interest; we geeks know Microsoft, and none of us will fall for that trap any longer. This, however, is not yet the case with Apple – people still have this 1984-esque perception of Apple being the rebel, and this leads to people accepting H264 without question.
This is dangerous, and will cripple the web once again. And yes, I will hammer on this subject on OSNews for as long as it takes. I have no problems whatsoever with proprietary software or technologies (heck, my media centres both run Windows 7, and I love my iPhone), but when it comes to the web, I am nearly militant about keeping it open. I still remember the days when not having Flash was a major problem on many alternative operating systems, and just as we are starting to break free from it, Apple and Microsoft come in, pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, and shackle the web to yet another proprietary technology.
I don’t want to boot up Haiku R1 only to not be able to watch video content on the web. It brings back too many unpleasant memories of yore.
iTunes
This one is strongly related to the Carbon aspect. Jobs’ letter talks about how it’s bad for a platform if developers use cross-platform technologies, and more specifically, that Adobe has been slow in adopting new technologies in Mac OS X, with Carbon of course being the prime example.
And yet, without any sense of shame, Apple ships iTunes for Windows. iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. It does not integrate with Windows in any way, does not use any of the advanced technologies present since Windows Vista (refined in Windows 7), it’s incredibly slow, it crashes a lot, it still hasn’t been ported to 64bit (despite consumer 64bit versions of Windows existing since 2005) and in general, sucks harder than a… No, I’m not going to finish that analogy.
Oh, and of course, it installs a whole boatload of services that run in the background without actually asking you for permission. Install iTunes on Windows, and watch WinPatrol spaz out.
Remind you of anything? Yes, iTunes (and all other Windows software Apple ships) is the Flash of the Windows platform (other than, uh, Flash itself, obviously). The hypocrisy is so thick here you could cut it with a knife. What makes it worse is the situation isn’t getting any better – quite the opposite. Every new version of iTunes for Windows only seems to make it worse instead of better.
I have an iPhone and I love it. However, I will not install iTunes for Windows. I installed it to first set up my iPhone and transfer my CD collection, and then removed it as quickly as I could. I’ll install it again on a Windows machine once iPhone OS 4.0 is released. Point releases be damned.
This actually brings up the last point I wanted to make, yet another point to illustrate the hypocrisy. My main desktop, which I use for everything, has always had Linux installed alongside Windows, but somewhere late last year I realised I didn’t really use Windows any longer, so I decided to just remove it altogether.
This, of course, has cut me off from iTunes (yay!), while also cutting me off from access to my iPhone (boo!). It would be incredibly trivial for Apple to allow people to manage their iPhone’s and iPod’s contents manually through the file manager, but illustrating its love for double standards, Apple refuses to. They want to tie you to iTunes, world’s worst piece of Windows software.
Conclusion
I really dreaded writing this article, since it will surely be construed as me somehow being pro-Microsoft. The issue, however, is that pointing out that Microsoft is two-faced about open standards is about as useful as pointing out that humans need oxygen to live. Stating the obvious is not interesting.
Apple is continuously putting itself out there as the hero of open standards, which is okay. That’s called marketing and there’s nothing wrong with it. Every company does it (Google comes to mind), but the scary thing with Apple is that so many people actually eat this marketing up as fact.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to watch Twin Peaks on one of my Windows 7-powered media centres, while checking my iPhone for messages. I’m nothing if not totally aware of my own hypocrisy.
iTunes has been ported to 64-bit. if you try and install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit OS, it complains and tells you to get the 64-bit version instead. At least this is what it did with my 64-bit Windows 7 about 1 month ago when I broke down and got an iPhone.
It’s a 32bit binary.
Gotcha. I never looked into it. Thanks for clarifying.
The Mac version is 32bit aswell, this topic has been raised again and again. 64bit will not really make iTunes run any faster, it’s not using over 2GB per process in windows, my itunes hovers around 200MB on my Mac. There won’t be any benefits from the registers on a 64bit processor, so i don’t know what 64bit will bring to the table both for windows and mac.
iTunes is slow because it does too much, they should have broken iTunes down into more separate apps, perhaps that would speed it up. Music, video etc. with a iphone/iphone sync app that plugs into them all, as itunes currently does with iPhoto.
64bit iTunes in windows just provides the drivers for burning a CD.
As for the topic of hypocrisy, i think apple are quite open with some of their tech, such as CUPS, webkit etc. Of course they could be more open but it’s not going to happen. As for the platform as a whole, to have the mac experience you lose certain choices, the same way you do if you use windows instead of Linux.
Throughout this war ive been on the side of apple, HTML5 videos in youtube run with little cpu power (10% if that), flash videos run at about 70% on the mac. I think HTML5 is the way to go, it’s a lot more open than Flash, its not perfect by any means as the codec powering some of the content is up for debate, but at least HTML5 gives us that choice.
The platform might be closed on a mac, but their interaction with other computers is very open, webkit browser, using samba for sharing to other SMB network, cups drivers, VNC remote access etc..
I don’t see how h264 is more open than flash. I think they both suck but atleast Adobe won’t sue you if you happen to watch an unlicensed video
Edited 2010-04-29 18:10 UTC
And the funny thing is that encouraging the use of H.264 has the unintended consequence of encouraging the continued use of Flash. Since Flash supports H.264, any site that uses H.264 files in HTML5 <video> tags will probably also offer the same video through Flash (since that’s the easiest way to provide the same video to XP and Vista users).
If Apple truly wanted to “save” the web from the evils of Flash, then throwing support behind H.264 is self-defeating (at least in the short-term).
I think it is important to note that when Apple bought CUPS, it was already GPL’ed, so if they had not shared it, there would have been outrage followed by a fork. Also, they forked Webkit from KHTML, making it a derivative work of LGPL’ed code, so they have to be open with that as well. I would say that Apple’s stance on open standards is this: they are willing to use open standards/code when it is convenient for them, and are not evil about it when they do. The problem that we have is that it is they are not above being evil about other things.
Excellent point.
I see your point but its irrelevant. Apple could of just wrote their own or licensed a proprietary solution, the same goes for webkit. They decided to go with more open solutions and have been heavy contributors to the OSS world eventhough they have the capital and technical staff to roll their own stuff if they wanted to. Saying that the projects were GPL before or BSD doesn’t mean anything, it just means that they chose open solutions to build upon.
I don’t know what was said at Apple when deciding on how to go about implementing printing support even building a web browser anymore than you but my gut feeling tells me the cost of development from scratch vs. cost of development from utilizing existing solutions was brought up in the discussion.
Why do I care that it’s not been ported to 64-bit? 64-bit isn’t faster for that purpose (we’re not calculating black hole creation or plotting jump coordinates), 32-bit binaries run fine in Windows 7 64-bit, and iTunes isn’t using more than 2 GBytes of RAM, so why do I care?
Seems to me that holier-than-thou applies to some OS News editors as well.
But that’s just common .nl-ism.
“I really dreaded writing this article, since it will surely be construed as me somehow being pro-Microsoft”
We don’t care. Really.
Apparently you do, since you are reacting to it.
Anyway, I think Thom’s article provides some nice counterpoints. Especially Jobs’ Carbon -> Cocoa transition argument is nonsense, as pointed out by Thom.
I expect more fireworks to come the next few weeks. Once it’s done, maybe we can settle on HTML5 + Theora, or hopefully VP8
.
Edited 2010-04-29 17:25 UTC
Switching to Cocoa *isn’t* “hard”, as you put it. Adobe pulled it off in eight months in the CS5 prerelease programme as we watched. It’s that fact that they *never bothered* because they were happy coasting on the old Carbon APIs and didn’t care that Apple was trying to push them to switch for ten years.
All the Creative Suite apps were *already* cross-platform, and Cocoa is just another UI layer. They didn’t have to rewrite the apps from the ground up.
Then the problem becomes if converting over is so easy and Adobe was just ‘dragging their feet’ why did it take Apple so long to convert their own programs when they are the ones who developed the APIs?
If it is easy, then Apple is in the wrong complaining about others not converting code when they have not done it themselves.
If it is hard, then Apple is in the wrong demand that others should be converting faster than them themselves have be doing it.
There is also the fact that many Cocoa frameworks are incredibly buggy; Adobe couldn’t take advantage of Core Animation for Flash until Apple fixed up some major bugs and even then the improvements of 10.1 won’t be noticeable until Apple move Safari from Quartz2D to Core Animation which won’t be for months. So the issue in many cases comes back to Apple doing very little in the way of liaison with third party developers.
Heck, Microsoft and Adobe have worked together to optimise Flash for the desktop and for Windows Phone 7 – where is Apple? Quite frankly at the rate Apple is going and their behaviour over the last year, this is the last Apple product I will ever buy.
Thom,
I disagree with you quite often on technical matters but I have to agree almost completely with this article and give you a “thumbs up”. There is only one sentence that I have an issue with:”people still have this 1984-esque perception of Apple being the rebel”
I, actually, have the right 1984 perception of Jobs (Orwellian 1984, and I don’t like it a single bit.
careful you guys, you might get accused of being biased against apple. Apple “enthusiasts” do have a large presence online and they can drive a hell of a traffic your way if you cater to their egos .
Most of these people arent known to be rational when it comes to apple and any point of view, no matter how rational, will be seen as nothing but deep hatred on anything apple brought about from pure jealousy of how successful apple is.
does the jon steward episode from last night signifies a change on how the media sees apple?
american audience can see the clip here:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-28-2010/appholes
“international” audience:
http://tv.gawker.com/5526868/jon-stewart-slams-apple-over-its-handl…
i honestly wish he would have just blown everybody off when it comes to the flash thing.. Flash is crap. it’s always been crap.. I don’t feel the need to have steve jobs or anybody else gratify their reasoning for omitting flash.. of course you’ll get marketing, of course you’ll get jobsian babble about what greatness he’s doing in ridding the world of flash..
what every happened to not buying something.. if you want your battery to last 10 minutes and your phone to burst into flames on every website you look at with flash.. don’t buy an iphone or an ipad. it’s not rocket science guys… you aren’t required to purchase products which do things that you don’t like.
as a former actionscript developer and a long time iphone/ipad/imac/macbook user i’d be happy to see adobe drop flash entirely, it’s crap.
Calling “crap” to the product of the work of someone sounds very disrespectful for me.
If Flash is crap, I do not kind it is more “crap” than all the Apple policies they are throwing lastly.
Nice job on this one, Thom. We’re often at odds, but not on this. Still, if I had to pick between Flash and HTML 5 with H.264, I’d pick the second choice. At least it would end up better than what we currently have, and heck you don’t *need* to use H.264 with HTML 5 if you don’t want to. Try using Theora with Flash… at least with HTML 5 you’d still have that option. Apple are certainly being two-faced about this, but if money’s going to decide the issue I’d rather Apple got their way, at least this time, than Adobe.
One thing though, you can manage your iPhone under Linux to some extent. You can get music and podcasts to it, but not movies unless you’ve had more luck getting gtkpod to work than I did. Funny that, Rhythmbox and Gpodder work fine with my iPhone 3gs but gtkpod doesn’t, and they’re all using the same libraries to communicate with it. And of course, software update requires iTunes. Nevertheless it’s mostly workable depending on what you need.
Thom has made very legitimate points about Steve/Apple. I have not deleted Windows but, like Thom was saying, when I go from my Mac desktop to my Windows desktop and use iTunes, it is truly a cringe-worthy experience.
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives. In this case the ball is in Adobe’s court and Jobs has put it there. Adobe should really and truly get rid of Flash and embrace the new tools. Again, I am speaking in this more narrow sense and not in the wider sense that Thom did.
flash is crap, nobody disputes this.
Question: Why does apple not want flash on their devices?
Answer: because flash has a runtime apple can not control. The prohibition of this is in their developer’s agreement.
Saying this doesnt look good so they spin things.
Spin1: flush is a resource hog and drains battery life and that is why we dont allow it.
Adobe made their app to produce native code making spin1 moot and spin two was hence put forward
spin2: cross platform tools are inherently inferior.
it doesnt matter who has the ball, apple has the goal post and will move it around to maintain their strong hold on their devices and will spin things all day long.
not saying your point isnt valid, just saying it is used to justify moving around the goal post.
If you wanted the best experience for customers of your hardware, wouldn’t you be just as demanding of a high performance solution?
Oddly enough, I kinda believe that hardware is indeed mine, not Apple’s.
Go figure…
If you don’t buy it, it’s Apple’s still. They’re looking for potential customers all the time.
Good point, really.
Flash may be crap. But I want the freedom to choose crap.
Few things are new. In his classic 1934 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explored the issue that divides Jobs and Thom – how much is freedom worth? Mustapha in this extract sounds exactly like Steve Jobs. Thom sounds like the Savage. And I’m with Thom: there’s more to life than anodyne, predictable, reliable comfort. I want to choose for myself.
In Steve’s world of control freakery, anything he determines is bad is banned. The rest of us must don our black polo necks and behave like the clones he wants us to become.
No thank you.
But I want the freedom to choose crap
The problem is that the crap you want may affect others who don’t want crap. So, that type of freedom doesn’t apply.
And stop confusing software licenses with the constitution of the Unite States of America.
All good points regarding Apple and their ways. But, in that narrow sense, crap is crap is crap. And Flash is crap in so many ways. Because Adobe makes something that’s crap and it becomes a standard and they won’t do anything to really address it, force it out.
By the same token, force iTunes out. As someone suggested, make Apple break it up into smaller apps. We should all force these companies to make good stuff.
It’s pretty to say, to pretend, actually, that this is parallel to what is happening with Adobe. By the true same token, what would the reaction be if Microsoft forced iTunes out?
I tend to believe all Apple fans and Microsoft customers owners of iPods would cry out loud and it would be publicity hell.
But it seems the only option when you’re against Apple is to “vote with your pockets because Apple can do whatever it pleases with “it’s“ hardware.”
I actually latched on to this bit here:
“We should all force these companies to make good stuff.”
Which seems to suggest that “we” the consumers should be forcing these (Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Dell…) to deliver good stuff. If the majority of the user base yelled back, the companies would be forced to improve there products (see Microsoft’s quick address of Vista). It’s not for Microsoft to force Itunes out bit rather for us end users to do so.
I understand this. The point is, he is saying that if our reasons for hating iTunes are the same as those Apple says we obviously have for hating Flash, why don’t we force iTunes out.
I try to draw a parallel to show that Apple should leave it to US to force flash out. Not force that decision down on our heads.
Because, and that is my previous point, if Microsoft would to be so “grand” as Apple and do it for us, it’d be the great evil company of the galaxy.
Edit: Oh, and please ignore grammar/spelling mistakes, or the post entirely if it’s hard to make sense of it. I just woke up and didn’t even get up yet… dizzy.
Edited 2010-04-30 14:11 UTC
I would hope people are still not deluded enough to think Apple is less evil than Microsoft. Mind you, given the target, I’d be just as enthusiastic about Microsoft pushing out Itunes as I am about Apple pushing out Flash. Both are horrid pieces of software forced on the end user through synthetic “requirements”. Recognize that both companies are amoral companies in the business of making money but give credit where due.
So we just sit on different sides of the very same coin.
I, too, am just as enthusiastic of Microsoft pushing iTunes out as I am of Apple pushing Flash. That is, none at all.
But that’s just differente philosophies and I doubt we’ll have any success in presenting arguments convincing enough to change each other’s opinion on the matter.
I’m just happy to be proven wrong, since I was assuming there’d be a different reaction if it were another company. Even if I don’t agree with the opinion, at least it’s consistent
Oh, good. That means we can finally get rid of religion in the USA since I believe it’s crap and yet I’m subjected to it just by walking around or listening to the radio. Their freedom, after all, doesn’t apply because it inconveniences me.
Seriously, do you even understand the magnitude of the stupidity of what you just said?
what part of And stop confusing software licenses with the constitution of the Unite States of America.
you didn’t understand?
At what point did I even go into licenses? Do you not know the meaning of context? I took exactly what you said and put it in a much broader context. If you think it sounds ridiculous, perhaps that’s because it *does* sound ridiculous when you actually extrapolate to a broader point of view. What you said was that people don’t have the right to choose crap if others may be subjected to it. I think, as I said in my example, religion is crap. By your logic then, *you* would have no right to it because it inconveniences *me*. Ridiculous? You bet your ass it is, but that is where your logic would lead everyone if applied. It’s no different, in this case, if applied to technology versus life issues. You want a more technological example? Fine, here you go. I think Windows sucks, and it’s inconvenient that I have to go through that damn mess of a registry to remove a virus from someone’s computer when Norton has fscked up the computer worse than the virus already did. Their choice has inconvenienced me, therefore they have no right to use Windows or Norton. Clear enough?
At no point were licenses, or the constitution, brought into this. Maybe you need to work on your reading comprehension skills?
Well, your context sucked, comparing software licences with basic civil rigths is simple not compatible.
Honestly, if this is the extent of your conversation skills then we’re done here. While you’re learning to read, learn to write more than a single sentence too. Trust me, it’ll help later.
You have the right to chose another phone, too. It’s a product, with a certain architecture/echosystem, which you are free to use or not. There is no moral to it, no good vs evil.
Patrix
Of course, that didn’t stop Apple from including Flash support in QuickTime for years… and they only removed that support when people started creating iMovie plugins using Flash (because QT’s Flash support enabled iMovie plugins which added functionality that was otherwise only available in the Final Cut products).
At what point did Steve Jobs nominate himself as the bouncer at the entry of my device? If I wish to install Flash on my i-device then I should be allowed to, just as I should be allowed to install what ever application produced with what ever tool I want on my device. Does Flash suck on Mac OS X? of course but how much of it is actually solely the result of Adobe because ultimately it takes two to tango.
Btw, don’t think that HTML5 is going to be the saving grace of the internet given that all benchmarks shown that an equally as complex application as what is produced in flash will hog just as much CPU power. Was Flash 10.0 a hog? sure, but 10.1 has changed, improved, and it is up to Apple to work with Adobe to improve performance just as it is up to developers who write for Flash to ensure that they’re using the best code to achieve a given objective.
It has a lot of good points.
But it misses the endgame. Charging people in any way for making copies of bits is immoral.(Apple and MS are doing that on a fairly regular basis.) You can ask for money for services, but the act of copying bits has no cost and hence has to be free.
Anything else is just old simple minded analog thinking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8
It’s deluded thinking to believe that the Red Hat model can be used for all types of software. I just went over this on my blog:
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/04/advertising-in-open-source.html
Such thinking comes from a bitter old man who doesn’t care about software economics and just has a grudge against closed source. How is his Hurd project going by the way? He has so much faith in the holy power of open source and yet his own software project is still unfinished.
Why drudge up Hurd?
Linux
GNOME
KDE
Apache
Firefox
Thunderbird
There seems to be quite a bit of successful examples to draw on and some of them are not remotely licensed under GPL.
And since you mention Hurd, are you suggesting that there are no failing closed source development projects? They are automatically successful because they don’t happen to relate to an angry man and one of many different OS kernels?
Edited 2010-04-30 12:54 UTC
Let me just start by saying that I use Linux and open source exclusively and don’t like proprietary software at all.
That said, you are very incorrect.
Why? It indeed costs nearly $0 to make a copy of bits, but those bits would not exist without the money. By your reasoning, all of the cost of a book should go toward printing and physically creating the book, and the author should not get a dime.
By saying “making copies of bits” you make those bits sound less important than they really are. Those bits are the music you listen to, the books you read, and maybe some of the software you use. In many cases, those bits would not exist without the author getting paid.
If you believe that is immoral, fine, morality is specific to each person. But reality isn’t. The world would simply be a very different place without copyright.
I think the thing you are missing is that, for example, the e-book is the direct equivalent of a real book, and should be valued as such (minus the printing costs). You are trying to make digital works seem somehow inherently different than physical works, when it is really just a different medium.
Why not? The original bits would not exist without the money. Whereas the duplicate bits only required the cost to produce them, nearly £0.
You’re incorrectly assuming ‘worth’ should be transferred upon duplication.
/Me takes his pop-corns.
I truly can’t stand to see someone use niceness or flattery and in this case “holier-than-thou” with ulterior motives. Nice article Tom.
For what it’s worth, Adobe was dragging its feet on switching to Carbon. The framework was there in Mac OS 8.x and they likely didn’t investigate it at all.
When they finally released Photoshop 7, it was a minimal Carbon application and ran much better on Mac OS (8.x, 9.x) than Mac OS X. That was typical of an application where someone added “#include carbon.h” and the carbon libraries to the project and re-built the thing.
Adobe always seem to do the minimum.
As far as Steve Jobs being a hypocrite, isn’t that typical of all leaders? I’ve seen videos of several people important to computing and they’re all interested in doing what’s best for their own group, not the rest of the world and they’ll do whatever it takes to secure their own interests.
I am a Linux user, all problems when browsing (Chrome/Firefox) comes from Flash.
When I say ALL, it’s ALL.
In facebook, flash videos stops in the middle, so I need to replay from the middle everytime.
When listening to music provided with flash streaming, it crashes after ~1h of listening.
When I open many tabs including Youtube, they crashes.
ALL Flash sites looks baaaaaad.
When I play video I listen to to fan of my CPU turning fast because of the huge CPU usage.
IT IS CRAP. And CPU intensive in addition…
We all agree about it.
However, Thom is not talking about how crap is Flash.
He is talking about how evil is apple. Apple IS the evil of evil.
Actually, i think Apple is as most evil as an IT company could be.
Edited 2010-04-29 19:14 UTC
Oh rubbish. Calling Microsoft and Apple evil is plain stupid. These are companies who are motivated by profit, that’s not evil people! If you want to talk about evil companies then we should be discussing Coca Cola.
What company out there cares about you, not your money? There isn’t one.
Healthcare systems don’t care. Banks don’t care. Religious groups (they might as well be companies) don’t care. So, why should computer companies care about you?
Well, isn’t that a lovely world to live in…
I completely fail to sympathise with the issues some people have with iTunes in these parts. Frankly, I don’t have time or inclination to be messing about installing 3rd party software that requires (IMO) excess faffing, manual configuration and invariably causes more work down the line.
I plug my iPod or iPhone in, it syncs all my stuff in a few moments. It gives me seamless, straightforward access to enormous amounts of free, useful interesting podcasts and ItunesU. Job done.
I run on W7, it’s snappy, I turned off all the updates in the background. It says up there it crashes a lot, I say I can’t remember a time it ever did. It organises stuff for me so I don’t even think about the file directories.
Don’t use it if you don’t like it, sure. I bet I am not the only one who likes the fact “it just works”.
That is exactly why Apple is so successful.
A lot of people in these type of websites seem to think that when a customer buys an electronic device, their buying decision is approached in the same manner as if they were looking for a political ethos. Nothing of the sort. Maybe some do, but that is an infinitesimal minority.
People trying to undermine Jobs should present alternatives which work better, and/or offer a higher level of convenience to the consumer. Going off on rants regarding political totalitarianism is extremely counter productive, due to the level of intellectual dishonesty/logical fallacies it brings.
Regardless of what I am think of Mr. Jobs personally (hint I don’t care much about people like him who display such nonexistent level of technological education, yet they get to dictate and control the development of the field which I feel passionate enough as to get a PhD in it), the fact is that even my mother can use iTunes and do exactly what she wants, and she is as technophobic as they come. She doesn’t know what a bit is, much less why 64 are better than 32. And cocoa for her is something which is drank hot.
My current instance of iTunes barely takes more than 30MB of RAM, and has yet to crash once on Windows. I plug in my iPod, it syncs it, no fuss no headache. It gets out of the way, I can quickly transfer the playlists I want so I can go out running as soon as possible. Which is what I love to do. When I try to do the same, under linux. I kept being reminded how “free” I am (I love Linux/BSD/Solaris BTW). But the fact of the matter, is that the last time I tried to do what was so easy under windows or OSX, it took so much time that the sun was downing by the time I was out for my run.
The ethos part is the easy one, the functionality part… that is the harder one. And that is where the challenge lies. People need to stop focusing on the “politics” or ethical aspects solely. They need to make a case that a better product that what Mr. Jobs’s reign of terror produces, and show it.
You … PhD in technology??? I am sorry, but I just can’t see it. iTunes has got to be one of the worst pieces of software ever written by a major software house!
I have a PhD in EE, but that is neither here nor there.
You are right, I should take the opinion of some random kid on the internet at face value, and not believe my lying eyes.
Millions of customers experience the agony of iTunes, which is the worst piece of software ever written… according to people who have not written more than 10 lines of code (5 of which were “hello world” and the other 5 were to fix the mistakes of their first attempt). It is such an awful piece of software, that people keep buying more and more iPods and iPhones which depend on iTunes. Mass masochism is to blame for that, I guess. No?
3 years of using iTunes on windows, not a crash I can remember. I must be lucky I guess… should I buy some lottery tickets while I am going through such lucky strike!
iTunes made sense to me when all the iPod was was a music player. While I don’t hate it and find it tolerable, there has got to be a better solution to sync your ipad/phone/touch…
I couldn’t care less about your experience with iTunes (nor his or hers), they do not provide ANY insight into the quality of an application. Every individual has a different experience.
My criteria is fairly simple:
-Does it follow general look of the operating system
-No
-Does it have a lot of dependencies (if yes are those acceptable)
-Yes, hell no
-Is there quality support for issues that surface
No, Apple has not fixed “fast user switching” issue.
-Does the software pretend to know more then I do, about what I really need and want (this is really bad)
Yes
There you go, very simple and to the point as to why iTunes IS a piece of junk.
And finally, take it from an engineer of telecommunications and information systems (me) who in his life wrote well above 50k lines of code, if you had a PhD in the relevant field your post would be entirely different 🙂
That’s amusing to me because there is so much software on Windows that doesn’t follow the look of the operating system. These days, office products are just about the only pieces of software that actually look as though they were designed for Windows.
Mind you, if you change the theme, iTunes is worse at acclimating to the changes of the operating system, but that could be fixed.
hehe exactly. Complaining that iTunes sucks because it doesn’t look like a Windows app is just foolish. What is a Windows app supposed to look like these days? Microsoft’s Office and IE developers obviously don’t know.
It depends on the size of your mp3 library.
iTunes on windows is dog slow.
A winamp plugin on an via eden (old, slow low power cpu)
was a lot quicker than itunes on a much faster desktop.
While I am an Apple Fanboy and usually do not find myself agreeing with Thom, I must say that he brings up some really valid points. The issue with Carbon is simply stunning. Why Finder was not ported with 10.3 or 10.4 is beyond me. This was a very nice rebuttal. Thom, despite your soap box grandstanding on most issues, your voice is a very important one in the tech community, and you help blind folks such as myself see things a little differently. I do fear that my favorite rebel company is becoming the so-called man, and that pains me to a degree (yeah, I really would love to see the Mac overtake MS, so only a little pain…). However, having people like you that in a small way help keep Apple honest is crucial. Keep up the good work!
I rarely bother commenting any more but great article Thom, I agree with every word.
You can pick apart any individual argument Jobs makes, but the bottom line is that Flash is proprietary and an unnecessary piece of crap and he is doing us a favor by forcing it into extinction.
Why isn’t he doing us any favors with h.264 then? Oh wait, that’s because he’s a hypocrite.
You either want open standards web or you don’t. It’s a bit hypocritical to constantly push open standards and then glom on to Adobe because of a vendetta against Apple.
Flash is done. Whether you like or dislike Apple the future is HTML5, CSS3 and javascript. That is the road to take. Apple is on it. Adobe with Flash is not.
Adobe can prop Flash up as long as they want but ultimately the technology is dead.
Edited 2010-04-29 19:39 UTC
*woosh*
Whose ego is larger? Thom’s or Jobs’?
Hah! I’ve got another one: Whose opinion is more independent? That of a respected OS fanatic who sees the big picture or that of a CEO of a big company trying to explain his business decisions?
Edited 2010-04-29 20:11 UTC
//Whose opinion is more independent? That of a respected OS fanatic who sees the big picture or that of a CEO of a big company trying to explain his business decisions? //
Thom’s opinion may very well be more independent.
Too bad his opinion isn’t worth two shits, compared to Jobs’.
On that, we agree.
Mine is, and I say Apple (and specifically Jobs) has nothing to do with openness. Neither does Adobe or Microsoft, but neither of these two is limiting my options (as an end user) nor is Microsoft limiting my options as a developer.
And yes I agree that flash (at least as it stands right now) is junk … but let ME decide about it, don’t be a fascist (or communist) and then try to sugarcoat it (spin it)
As for your post … I second *woosh*
Apple’s supportive nature for H.264 must be an illusion, then. Because it’s not an open standard. You just can’t be against Flash because it’s proprietary and support H.264 with a sane mind. You either propose a web that’s fully open or you opt for choice.
I can’t quite say that I am for or against H.264. Because things like video codecs are always going to change. But you are right… An open standard for video should be supported by Apple.
Here is my thing. People deride Apple for supporting h.264 like they are the only ones who are pushing it, which is not true. Google had no issues moving all of Youtube over to h.264. Even Adobe uses h.264. In-fact most video that use flash are encoded in h.264. Apple just wants to take the middle man out, especially when that middle man happens to run like crap and is lazy.
The fact of the matter is that at this time there are no real alternatives to h.264 that are even remotely in the same quality spectrum. Ogg has too many issues and has been around for years before they even got their asses in gear. Will it be better in the future , maybe but Apple has been using h.264 for years and Ogg wasn’t ready, other manufacturers are supporting the codec and have been able to hardware decode it for years as well. All this talk about h.264 but here are no alternatives. As much as you hate h.264 the fact of the matter is that its a spec that can be implemented by anyone in varying degrees and that makes it far more open that Flash which has only one company behind it, with one real implementation. How well they implement the runtime is solely up to them. Meanhwhile the best h.264 encoder on the market is an opensource one that anyone can freely download and use and that even most who use flash as the container format use to encode their videos.
For Thom to call Apple hypocrites because they back h.264 is disingenuous, naive and/or just shows plain ignorance on his part. As patent encumbered as the codec is its still far more open that Flash in every respect because it can be implemented anywhere by anyone, can you say the same for Flash? Patent encumbered doesn’t mean closed, having to pay a license doesn’t mean closed, it means you have to pay. The only real difference between using flash for video instead of HTML5 is that Adobe has already payed the license for h.264 for you. Half the world has already declared that h.264 is the codec for the internet age. Why use Flash when your video card and decode it directly. There is no difference, the majority have already declared it the winner. So Apple should just go with an inferior product that doesn’t have hardware support and is not heavily used? Pray tell how was Apple supposed to do this 3 years ago when the iphone was released? How good is Google’s support for hardware accelerated Ogg on Android?
…as long as you have the money to pay the hefty license fee, that is, which most project DO NOT have.
Actually, yes. The specifications are all there. It’s just that all non-Adobe implementations suck even more.
This good: http://www.osnews.com/story/23135/Google_Puts_Weight_Behind_Theora_…
Edited 2010-04-29 21:02 UTC
Except you are wrong, the specs are there but how Adobe’s runtime handle the spec is not documented which is why projects like gnash have issues implementing a successful opensource runtime. Like I said it doesn’t matter if projects have to pay to implement H.264, that doesn’t make it less open, it just means people have to pay, most projects such as hardware vendors pass that cost on to users. Its far more open than flash. Its a well known widely implemented spec, again, can you say the same for Flash? Is there any other runtime worth talking about other than Adobe’s? Adobe’s spec is primarily for creating Flash content not running it. Only Adobe’s own runtime is worth talking about.
With H.264 you have hundreds of different implementations, some opensource, all of varying quality, all from different vendors, just like web browsers.
You still haven’t answered my question as to what was Apple supposed to implement 3 years ago? What was available and able to run on the specced hardware of the 1st gen iphone? Another thing I want to ask is why harp on Apple, why not, Google? Android as far as I know only supports h.264 decoding on most of their phones. You keep harping on Apple being disingenuous but they chose a format that is widely used by everyone can be implemented by anyone with enough resources, is available on almost every platform I can think of, and if not is fairly trivial to create a codec for your favorite platform using open and free libs. Again can you say the same for Adobe? For all intents an purposes h.264 is an open format. Especially compared to Flash.
They don’t have to prop up Flash, Google will do that for them. And all those Flash game designers are not going to line up to build games in javascript with a text editor.
Flash is just going to get better with future iterations and 10.1 is already a big improvement:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_html5_really_beat_flash_s…
I personally don’t like Flash but I also know that it would take a much stronger alliance to dislodge it. At some point it will be apparent to everyone that Jobs is just blocking Flash because it would cut into iTunes revenue.
Thom is right that it’s a total joke for Jobs to be self-righteous and praise open technologies. He should have focused on security or another believable reason. What a freaking joke.
Did he even need to explain himself? Flash doesn’t exactly have a flourishing fanbase. He could have just stated that he isn’t including Flash because he doesn’t want to support it and that would have been enough of an explanation.
They’re all hypocrites so it’s rather moot to me. Apple definitely took too long to migrate the Finder, but at the same time the real issue is web standards.
Adobe has some great talent and could easily develop an IDE… Heck they own Dreamweaver don’t they? You’re right Google will prop Flash up for Adobe and we will applaud them for keeping us shackled to a proprietary format while we scream at Apple for H.264. The irony is delicious. None of these companies really stand up to scrutiny do they?
You all missed out the most interesting part in Jobs words.
“Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future”
=> A new Apple IDE coming for html5,css,JS ??
Not all people like coding everything from ZERO, people using Flash have a great IDE with many feature.
Maybe we will see Apple providing a similar tool for that generating HTML5 and Javascript+CSS code.
It is realy unbelievable that we still don’t have any IDE with easy interface that generate HTML5 code.
Apple already has an IDE, it’s called xcode. Lost in all of this is that compelling applications can be created for the iphone, itouch, ipad, etc with only html, css and javascript. There is no need for the app store and your app can’t get rejected by Apple.
Distribution is just a web server away and they will even continue to function offline.
Ultimately all technology is dead so what’s your point?
Apple obviously don’t.
Is that like how Apple is on the wrong road with video codecs?
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to watch Twin Peaks on one of my Windows 7-powered media centres, while checking my iPhone for messages. I’m nothing if not totally aware of my own hypocrisy.”
At least you’re honest about it. Thanks for the forthright article.
I don’t know if I buy the licensing fee issue; I could see that in their dismissal of theora, but they still collect a license fee from Adobe for flash anyways. Besides, Apple is only one stakeholder in a very large pool and H.264 is relatively cheap to license, and capped, so while I imagine the royalty pool is not an insignificant amount of money, I suspect Apple’s annual take is but a drop in their financial bucket.
Agree whole heartedly on the iTunes issue. I have always felt his stance on Flash and frameworks was hypocritical, since iTunes on Windows seems designed only to exaggerate the issue. Why am I importing OSX into Windows as a framework for a synching app? Why am I installing a number of different services running in the background? If this is part of an attempt to export the “OSX experience” to Windows users, it’s failed miserably in my case.
And QuickTime? *shudder*
I see the benefit to HTML 5 and think it’s ultimately the right direction to head in, but I also think that Flash is far more entrenched than people think and dismissing it is foolhardy. Most of the complaints about flash relate to it’s abuse as an ad banner system, or poor unaccelerated performance etc, and are perfectly valid. But I’ve also seen Flash used as a framework for a number of in-house corporate applications, training software, etc. I’ve even seen Flash used as a Webex/Livemeeting alternative for conference calls, and it worked very well. It’s a powerful tool when used properly and not abusively, and is a far more mature technology for developers.
I’m sure that many of the big content companies will bow down and start delivering video in an iPad friendly format, and that’s not a bad thing. But I don’t think the game designers, corporate developers, assorted media developers etc. are going to drop Flash any time soon.
The other thing that strikes me is that Jobs keeps referring to flash as a closed, proprietary technology. Proprietary, maybe, but Adobe has published the spec and Apple would be free to implement a “better” Flash if they wanted to, one optimized for OSX and providing a better experience. The reality is that they don’t want any one outside of Cupertino leveraging the platform in a way they can’t control. IMHO, that is the ultimate reason that Mac lost their first-to-market advantage to Windows, and the ultimate reason that they will wind up losing their first-to-market advantage with the iPhone/iPad. That type of control simply cannot scale to a larger market with more widely varying requirements.
Personally, I’ve never felt the need for Flash on my mobile. But with Jobs baring his teeth now, I’m actually interested to see how well it’s going to run on my N1. *IF* Adobe can actually pull it off and have it perform well, it could give Android a significant edge as a development platform. That will be interesting to see. While I can see numerous areas where Android lacks the refinement of the iPhone, I can also see that it has substantial potential. Wasn’t sure how I was going to like my Nexus, but I haven’t felt tempted to pop the SIM back into my 3GS since I bought it, so I’m hoping to see it gain even more traction.
Just my 2c.
Really? I can’t count the number of times that I came across a website that had a Flash video as part of the content. This is especially true for news and blog sites.
The funny thing is that I would still buy itunes games and movie rentals if I had Flash. It’s a very convenient service and has a great library. So I’m a little insulted that Father Jobs wants to protect me from Flash content under false pretenses.
I’d also like to get iTunes off my computer at some point so I’m waiting for the phone 7 series. The Zune software is great, one of the best reasons to own a Zune actually. Too bad MS has slacked in the phone department in the last 5 years.
Definitely, and it was a blessing to all Internet users that it did not become de facto standard system for multimedia streaming, when that technology war was running way back. Both Microsofts offering and that particular DRM ridden crapware from Apple lost, to RealPlayer as it were. Adding video capabilities to Flash combined with wide distribution, made it possible for it to sweep in and snatch the lead position for video with RealPlayers decline. Again denying QuickTime.
Good thing Jobs is not known to carry grudges, other wise one could be led to believe it was more than economic motives behind his attacks on Flash. Ehh sorry! That should have been: concerns for the user experience.
It really strikes me. If you have even the slightest knowledge about all this, the hypocrisy in Jobs’ letter hits you straight in the face. And still it amazes me how certain people applaud the leader for this. But I guess this is a war. And the first victim of a war is always honesty. Some people never learn…
*sad*
I am generally pretty in tune with Thom on things, but this is one we just do not see eye to eye.
I don’t see anything wrong with what Steve Jobs said. I agree largely that Flash performance blows on OS X, cross platform tools will lead to lowest common denominator apps of *what the IDE supports*. I don’t know why anyone would think Flash is necessary but not Java or other runtimes. And I don’t know why anyone would think that Apple is required – or even should – to permit non-natively compiled apps that don’t provide a seamless experience when there are so many that do.
The whole concept that Apple is somehow hypocritical for suggesting an open web is preferable even atop an closed underlying OS perplexes me. That’s akin to saying “Since Windows is closed source, you should dump HTML and CSS.” It’s not all-or-nothing.
And this iTunes thing is nonsense: iTunes has always worked seamlessly on OS X, Creative Suite, on the other hand, had many benefits awaiting its transition to Cocoa. It’s just silly to compare the two.
Count me as a firm “disgree” here.
I also thought that Jobs’ letter was effective, and although Thom pokes holes in Jobs’ argument quite handily, I don’t find it the least bit objectionable that Steve Jobs should advocate for his position on his own web site. Jobs is an egomaniac, for sure. The fact that he picks and chooses facts to make his point doesn’t necessarily make him a hypocrite, however — it makes him a “marketing expert,” and I think we can all agree that Jobs is one of the world’s greatest marketing experts, and kind of a jerk. And also a visionary product guy who makes stuff that people want to buy.
Steve Jobs is so good at making stuff that people want that even people who are really angry at him for Apple’s self-serving (and in my opinion short-sighted) business and technology decisions still buy and use Apple products. You can decide that you want to reject Apple’s products on ideological grounds, and that’s a perfectly legitimate decision, and it’s your freedom as a consumer, just as you might reject diamonds, or feedlot beef or Wal-mart. But most people will still shop and Wal-mart and buy feedlot beef and don’t make their technology decisions based on ideology. And even people like me who object strenuously to some of Apple’s decisions will still hold their noses and buy an iPhone, until a better alternative strikes our fancy, and I don’t think that makes us hypocrites. It just makes us normal, conflicted consumers who have to navigate a moral minefield every time we buy something.
Oh, and I also don’t care if “on paper” iTunes is crappy software. I’ve never had any problems with it, on Mac or Windows. I do wish I didn’t have to jailbreak my iPhone to be able to transfer files to it without iTunes, though. (Though I would jailbreak my iPhone anyway, because I”m just like that).
Edited 2010-04-29 22:41 UTC
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-i…
Jobs isn’t being hypocritical commenting on Adobe’s recent and perhaps late move from Carbon to Cocoa. iTunes on Windows might not use all the features of the OS, but iTunes isn’t a development layer for applications that Microsoft is relying on to have the best and latest applications written for it’s operating system. Apple’s own programs that haven’t been updated are also not stopping developers create the latest applications.
No analogy. No hypocrisy.
I am a developer. I have coded in both Carbon and Cocoa. Here is the *reality*. No, it is *not* easy to convert an established application from Carbon to Cocoa. It takes a lot of effort. Carbon and Cocoa are completely different API’s based on a completely different model. Carbon has more akin to the Windows API than Cocoa. Carbon is procedural, C based, has an explicit run loop and needs a lot of boiler plate code to do anything useful. The reality is, Apple said a long time ago, nearly 10 years now, that Carbon was a temp API to bridge the gap. However, I think they themselves underestimated how much work it tales to migrate. I think Thom also does this too. It is not simple, it would be like translating a Dutch text in to English. Many parts translate directly, a lot of the logic stays the same, but big parts need to be reworked.
So, what of Apple’s own apps being Carbon? I would say, they are migrating the apps at a fairly steady pace. You need to understand how software works to appreciate why they aren’t working faster – if we need to continue to improve a product, the newer version needs to be developed in parallel and the feature set needs to catch up to be viable. Look at what happened with iMovie as an example of why this is true (think of the stink raised when users of iMovie HD used iMovie 08 for the first time..) You will see the rest of Apples software migrate over time.
Your first point about the time it’s taken Adobe to transition when Apple still have Carbon apps is relevant and worthwhile. Much of the rest is questionable at best.
You answered this in your own statement – “…full of openness and STANDARDS…” H.264 is a STANDARD. Flash and Theora are not.
This is a FREE CONSUMER application that is GIVEN AWAY by Apple. They do not charge for it, unlike Adobe and Microsoft who charge significant dollars for PROFESSIONAL applications like CS and Office, both of which suffer from ALL of the same inadequacies you throw at iTunes. It’s only in recent releases that Microsoft have even tried to improve the “Macness” of Office, but it still falls a LONG way short of the mark, and don’t get me started on the performance issues and impact on the performance of the rest of the system caused by these apps. And if you want to talk about background shit being installed look no further than those apps, and even the free Picasa from Google installs their updater so it’s not just Apple in that boat.
Further on this point. iTunes is a consumer product that is used (except if its just playing music in the background) for short periods of time. My son uses a Windows box as his primary machine because of games and has absolutely no issues with iTunes whatsoever. He can connect to the shared libraries that are hosted on other Macs throughout the house and will often have iTunes playing music while he’s gaming. He manages his iPhone with it, buys stuff off ITMS and it just works, as a consumer product.
Contrast this to something like CS and Office, which are professional apps that are used all day by large sections of the workforce. On my own machine I have disabled the background crap that Office loads because of the performance degradation, and the only product from the CS suite I will install is Photoshop because the others are diabolically bad, especially Dreamweaver. My wife, who uses a Windows terminal with MS Office at work, is constantly tearing her hair out using Office on her Mac. Not only is it slow, it balks at large files every second time you open them – we have a 32Mb Excel file that’s created as a product export from one of the web sites I manage that WILL NOT open on Mac Office EVER yet opens in less than 10 seconds on the Windows version – and I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time Office crashed on her. And these are commercial apps that they charge many $$$ for.
Then anyone who “found” your iPhone in a bar somewhere could also access all your private data from it just by plugging it in.
What the HELL should I use. It could just be that given the choice between flash and not-flash I will choose not-flash. I have worked too hard at this through the system 7 and 8 and 9 days only to have it ripped out and have apple make an implementation that really is about standards.
I can use a non flash implementation everywhere. Including Linux, I cannot remember the same thing being true of flash and silverlight. So I can be like three out of four hypocrites and LOVE Linux enough to use Microsoft AND Adobe and other popular standards or I can put my money where my code is.
These days it is popular to hate on the Mac OS but why? They caught the future and they made a Unix anyone can use. Or I can run Linux and Windows. I tried it it sucked. Or Mac plus Windows. I tried it and it also sucked OR I can just get the fukk over it and go for what I know at least in my heart works. And for the other piece of time when I need something that the Mac cannot do then my VM runs plain jane debian. The economics of this are very scary. No bullshit untrustworthy licenses for alpha quality software.
What if I have one machine that has no Microsoft or Adobe and I still get the job done. In OS X i could not join the future until I left Carbon and OS 8/9 behind. Can you live in a world without adobe and microsoft?
… the reality distortion field slapped down for a moment.
It really takes giant brass cojones for ANYONE at Apple to talk about ‘openness’ given that “our way or the highway” seems to be the company motto. NOBODY in the computer industry since the 8 bit era died has practiced more vendor lock-in than Apple.
That anyone who knows ANYTHING about computers would fall for this malarkey is unbelievable – of course, nobody who actually KNOWS anything about computers is dumb enough to throw money away on any of their products.
But by their own admission – in computers the majority of consumers is not their target audience… They don’t want the people who can’t afford to throw a few hundred dollars away on a phone or $600 on the functionality of a nettop as customers. See why the only computer they make that has anything resembling REAL upgrades starts out at over two and a half grand for what you could build in a $1200 i7. Actually, that’s not fair… to the whitebox – you’d be hard pressed to build an i7 with that LITTLE RAM or Hard Drive.
Though Thom – GREAT job of showing Apple’s card stacking in action. Apple always tries to make wild marketing claims about their competitors that are things they themselves do… Card stacking – supporting one’s position by omitting the facts that contradict you. Ranks right up there with Apple’s use of Bandwagon, Plain folks, Name Calling, and other indoctrinational propaganda techniques that border on brainwashing techniques.
Which I swear still has to be the ONLY reason ANYONE is dumb enough to buy ANY of their crap.
Concerning lock-in since the 8-bit era: that is very true. The Apple II was a fantastic machine for tinkerers. But after the launch of the Lisa, Apple became a very closed system in general.
http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/we-are-removing-flash-support-from…)
That’s fantastic. The barb at Gruber an especially nice touch!
FTA:
http://www.libimobiledevice.org/
Enjoy!
Caveat:
Thom, if you are running Ubuntu Lucid, you will have to get the latest release (1.0.0) seperately, because AFAIK Lucid ships only with version 0.8 something.
PS: Here is a ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~pmcenery/+archive/ppa
Edited 2010-04-30 03:30 UTC
Well done Thom. Well said. Burn the wolves in sheep clothing. Burn them all.
No, what is scary is to always see a small author like you be a know-it-all and think that you are always true.
I rarely agree with Thom, I think he probably knows that… but he speaks sense, this is pure marketing, it’s lunk from the apple.com homepage ffs.
You are eating up the marketing, are you not?
What do you mean ?
So you like Flash, then YOU are eating Adobe’s marketing …
I have the freedom to dislike flash even if Apple do so. I am tired of this bullshit.
Maybe you should start arguing against what Thom actually said in this article. Aren’t these points valid? Why not? And If they are valid, why does Jobs write so much sh*t? Because it’s marketing.
Thom can be a know it all at times – So can I
This time though – he knocked one out of the park…
Apple itself scary – nowhere near as much as that there are people out there who believe their lies and fall for the reality distortion field…
Frankly I’m repeatedly shocked that ANYONE is DUMB ENOUGH to buy any of their products… Which is funny since I’m rarely accused of underestimating the stupidity of my fellow man.
Exactly. It would be a lie to tell that Apple are somewhat more evil than other companies, in sense that they do more harm to the computing universe. Let’s take microsoft and remember ACPI, OoXML, Internet Explorer 6… Let’s take Intel, and their multiple attempts at preventing AMD from selling CPUs to computer manufacturers, in order to get absolute domination. Let’s take Google, defensors of free software, with H.264 videos everywhere in youtube and closed-source android apps as the perfect proof of this.
All companies want to make money, regardless of the harm they do. Therefore all powerful companies are dangerous. What makes Apple particularly frightening is that they don’t even have to hide themselves like some Microsoft rat. They tell the truth, explain clearly to people how they’re going to fsck them, and how much they’re proud of it, and people forget that as soon as they read it and say “ooooh… Look at that iTunes integration !” or “oooooh… A computer which can do about nothing is so simpler to use !”.
Google can do that, too, to a lesser extent, but they have to be a little smarter. They just have to open up VP8, and open source advocates will completely forget about H.264 everywhere in Youtube. Do little, get great sympathy.
#!rant
Edited 2010-04-30 20:16 UTC
Thom.
Your editorial is irrelevant. I can easily argue that Jobs is not being hypocritical and holier-than-thou but even if I grant that he is, HE IS STILL CORRECT. You even admit as much. Jobs’ overall message and individual points were correct. Who cares if you think he is holier-than-thou or hypocritical?
At the risk of being accused of being holier-than-thou, let me enlighten you further. I’ll be more-objective-than-thou.
Carbon:
Apple never wants a Mac version of an application to be inferior to the Windows version. The delay of CS5 to Cocoa was a result of Adobe favoring Windows users and it left Mac users with an inferior Adobe product for Mac. Likewise with Office. Apple responds to this when it happens. Witness the development of iWork Suite (Cocoa) as a response to the slow Office:Mac development. Final Cut Pro is best of breed already and will make it to Cocoa eventually but the fact that it is still 32-bit doesn’t put Mac users at a disadvantage. Jobs’ point about Adobe’s delaying the Cocoa transition was not only about the length of the delay but also about how it put Mac users at a disadvantage. It’s really not hypocritical and it is certainly correct.
H.264:
You need to either re-read Job’s letter or stop being misleading. NOWHERE in Jobs’ letter does he say H.264 is open. He says it is an industry standard. Surely you know the difference. Jobs touts H.264 as being performing better and taxing the battery much less. You are the one being misleading on this topic. Who is the hypocrite again?
iTunes:
Your attacks on iTunes are totally subjective, exaggerated, wrong, and irrelevant. Do you even know that iTunes for Windows is available as 64-bit or were you just lying? Jobs’ letter was about Adobe, not iTunes on Windows. Why are you misleading your reader?. Nothing you said about iTunes, even if it were all true (and it’s not), would make what Jobs said about Adobe wrong.
Maybe you got confused by Jobs’ meaning and intent because English is not your native language. Or maybe you are incapable of critical logical thinking. Or maybe you are being deliberately misleading. Frankly it doesn’t matter and you don’t matter. Like it or not, Jobs is right about Adobe and Flash.
Cocoa doesn’t necessarily make an application better, it’s the possible 64 bitness that matters here. Apple announced 64 bit Carbon for Leopard and included it in their preview developer builds. Companies were already at making theit apps 64 bit compatible. Then, all the sudden, just some months before the release of Leopard, Apple did a 180° move and killed Carbon 64. That’s why it took almost everybody so long to release a 64 bit version of their application. Some are still not done.
The facts that the Intel switch was still underway didn’t help to speed things up, either. You can’t omit this fact if you want to paint an honest picture of the circumstances.
OK. But still. This is like your seat neighbour in an airplane accusing you with strong language of unnecessary pollution of the atmosphere as a consequence of flying. You would just give him a facepalm and think WTF, and rightly so.
Apple does the same to their windows customers. All. The. Time.
Here is what Jobs says:
“we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open”
So what is says that they strongly believe that H.264 is the wrong codec, because it’s just an industry standard, not an open standard.
Oh really? Had you ever to use it on Windows?
That’s wrong and has already been discussed earlier.
It was about Adobe AND Apple. Apple rages about how Adobe cares about some of their products. Thom only mentioned that Apple is in no way any better. Isn’t that fair? Remember, it’s the extended version of a facepalm
Look in the mirror, all those facts that you left out just to make your arguments seem right…
You don’t matter, I don’t matter and Thom knows that he doesn’t matter. SO WHAT? I’d rather die with a smile on my face knowing I’ve always tried my best to be an honest man. Plus: This is the Internet, he just took his right to express how he feels about this. Expressing thoughts matters to people.
Thom didn’t say Steve Jobs is wrong in every aspect, OK?
Your arguments are delusional, misleading, incorrect, biased, nonsensical, out of context, or a combination of these. Let me simplify the issue further and settle this.
Jobs wrote what he wrote to explain why there will be no Flash on Apple mobile devices. That’s ALL he was commenting on and that’s all that need be discussed. Discussing other non-related issues (such as “Is Apple hypocritical?”) while maybe orgasmic for the likes of you and Thom, ARE SIMPLY NOT RELEVANT as they relate to what Jobs wrote. What Jobs said about Adobe and Flash was both logical and correct. Period.
In terms of whether or not Flash should be on Apple mobile devices, it doesn’t matter if Apple is hypocritical (they’re not), has a pact with Satan (they don’t), or beat their wives (they don’t). What matters is that there are many good reasons that Flash should not and will not be on Apple mobile devices. Period.
If you or Thommy want to write a new and separate post on reasons why Apple is hypocritical, go ahead, get out your hand lotion and knock yourself out. But that is a separate discussion and it won’t have anything to do with whether or not Flash should be on Apple mobile devices.
The bottom line is that Jobs simply set out to explain why Flash will not be on Apple mobile devices. No matter what you think about Jobs and Apple, what Jobs wrote was absolutely correct. End of discussion.
Okay.
Poppycock!
It’s true that flash does degrade performance. It is the major cause of system hangups on my netbook.
It is true that flash contributes to instability. Most of my browser crashes in Firefox, Chrome and Explorer have been due to flash.
It is also true that flash is far from perfect.
I can’t see why Apple and Adobe could not have worked together to produce better performance and stability but cutting out an entire technology from two hardware platforms
is reactionary and draconian. The arguments of supporting open technologies is no justification. I am at a loss for words by the audacity of the letter and I don’t think I want to give a well thought out argument. Steve Jobs didn’t bother to so why should I?
This is a good one to know, from some ex-adobe engineers.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/
While it doesn’t really have any baring on the Flash discussion, I’ll put it out there since we’re talking about Apple. It’s interesting how a company (or rather the top officers of that company) can be such pricks and yet not be pricks at the same time. I hear a lot of people calling Apple evil, and a good number of their practices are evil, and yet they’ve been putting in a concentrated effort to making most of their devices accessible. Other companies like MIcrosoft have paid lip service to accessibility without actually doing anything. Apple is actually making a phone (not to mention an iPod and iPad) that I can use out of the box without having to pay anything extra for special software. I can lump OS X in there too, although it’s not quite as dramatic since I don’t have to pay anything for *NIX accessibility either at least for CLI and GNOME/GTK (nothing for KDE yet). So, Apple is making a device that I can actually use at no additional cost. To me, that just isn’t evil, that’s damn nice especially when they didn’t have to put the effort into it that they obviously do. For other phones, I would have to pay an additional $300 for the software to make the phone output in speech. For Windows PCs… well, don’t even get me started on what it costs for that. For iPhone OS and OS X, nothing extra. Just get and go. Hopefully there’s a competitor soon in Android, I’d love to move to Android. It’s accessibility features just aren’t there yet though, how accessible is it if I can’t even read an email, eh Google?
I guess what I’m saying is that Apple isn’t black and white evil. Like any company, or any person for that matter, they do awesome things and they do shitty things. Of late, the shit seems to outnumber the awesome. Three years ago the awesome outnumbered the shit, and I’m sure it’ll swing back around again in the near future. In the end, given something more open that I can’t use or something closed tight but that I can fully use, the choice is no choice at all.
Edited 2010-05-01 10:52 UTC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10093314.stm
“The letter provoked an avalanche of comments online, with many saying Apple’s restrictions on what can be done with its software go far beyond those on Flash.
In an editorial on OS News, Tom Holwerda said Mr Jobs’ letter was “hypocritical” because Apple was guilty of many of the faults it levelled at Adobe.”
I have been following the Apple/Flash developments unfold for some time now and I think a lot of the issues presented with Steve Jobs’ argument against Flash don’t carry weight now – especially with the recent news about Theora. Anyway, I wanted to add my voice to the discussion:
http://andrewm.info/blog/13-2010/55-way-to-go-steve
I think the best way to run iTunes on any Windows machine, if it works, would be to run it inside a virtual machine like VirtualBox or Virtual-PC with an old copy of Windows XP or whatever is the oldest thing Apple’s rubbish will run on. That way, you can avoid the Apple crap-ware in your everyday life.
Or is that also against Apple’s license?
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
Porting the Finder to Cocoa wasn’t a priority because there was little benefit. As someone who has used it both before and after the port, I’m hard pressed to notice any real differences other than some animation effects. It’s always done the job.
And the Finder is not a development environment, nor is it cross platform. Plus there are 3rd party replacements if you want more choice.
FinalCut is not a development platform. It’s not holding the platform back nor degrading the experience solely because it’s written in Carbon.
Yes iTunes on Windows sucks but it’s a means to an end. Do you think the iPod would have succeeded if it required a Mac? Again, iTunes is not threatening the ‘Windows experience’. Developers cannot build more sucky apps on top of it. The crapware and anti-virus software that most PCs run is far, far worse that iTunes.
The whole Carbon/Cocoa thing is a red hearing anyway because they are purely Mac technologies uses to build Mac-only apps.
Job’s beef is with Flash which IS a closed-source proprietary framework upon which to build web content. They’re holding the mobile web hostage. Just as with their CS products, Adobe have gotten too used to coasting along and doing the absolute minimum. Have you used their installers? Total joke. All their stuff sucks hard on the Mac. We’re treated as second-class citizens.
I dont agree with all the huff & puff in this article by Thom.
Apple & Microsoft are dumping the cancer of Flash & supporting open standards (HTML5).
I agree with Apple.