Report: Jobs disses Adobe Flash as 'CPU hog'
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly continued his campaign against Adobe's Flash video technology, this time at a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, according to a report in Valleywag.
People who were at a recent meeting Jobs had with some of the paper's executives told the Gawker-owned site that Jobs dismissed Flash as "a CPU hog", full of "security holes", and "old technology" and would therefore not be including the technology on the iPad, or presumably, the iPhone. (Adobe did recently promise to make the Mac version of its browser plug-in faster.)
It's not the first time we've heard this. At an Apple shareholder meeting two years ago Jobs explained why Flash wouldn't be on the iPhone any time soon. He told those present that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and that the mobile version--Flash Lite--" is not capable of being used with the Web".
More recently, word leaked out from Apple's employee-only meeting after the iPad introduction that Jobs had slammed Flash. According to a report on Wired, he responded to an employee question that "whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it's because of Flash", and that "no one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5."
The lack of support in the iPad and the iPhone for the software that's essentially the Web standard for displaying online videos has drawn complaints, but mostly from a more technically inclined crowd. The likely reason Jobs is discussing Flash behind closed doors with employees and potential partners and not publicly? The vast majority of people he wants to buy his devices don't know what Flash is, and if they do, they don't care. They just want a device that works.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.