Apple’s iPad and the censorship of Apps and Internet
I’ve been waiting a while to comment on the iPad, but I think this screenshot, made by Adobe, sums it up perfectly, and saves me a lot of words:
By taking a major web technology, and completely deleting it from their device, Apple has made the iPad worthless.
It shouldn’t have an Mp3 player Operating System hacked/ported to what should be a computing platform.
It should not sync with iTunes. It should run iTunes. You should sync your iPhone or iPod to your iPad, not iPad to your computer. What if you want it to be your computer?
And, of course, multi-tasking. Give me a break: You can make an OS that runs circles around Windows for decades and you can’t bother your programmers to add 1 more item to their task lisk? Maybe they can’t multi-task either.
Apple, you say that you make products the way they should be made, not the way the mob wants them. And I’ve always liked that about you. So I’m gonna use the same philosophy: I don’t care how many hipsters, fanboys, coffee shoppers and scene geeks go out and buy this thing: Your new product missed the mark.
And so does your censorship of web technology. It is a slap in the face of all the designers, developers and creatives that have evangelized your products since your darkest days. You can’t just take a major component of the Internet, whether it’s HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, XML, etc, etc, or Flash, and completely remove it from your device.
Go back to your cubicles, create an iPad Pro (or whatever you want to call it, something better than “Pad”), price it $100 higher, put OSX or OSX-lite on it, the Real Safari with the Real Internet, and act like this upgraded version was going to be your flagship the whole time.
To be fair, Apple didn’t delete it from their device. They just never included it to begin with. Also, no other mobile OS supports flash, which won’t be available until the second half of 2010 (After being delayed for a couple of years). Multi-tasking is being added to the iPad with firmware 4.0 this fall (and in a month for iPhones) as mentioned by Jobs during the keynote.
You can’t just take a major component of the Internet, whether it’s HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, XML, etc, etc, or Flash, and completely remove it from your device.
Can you guess which one of these doesn’t belong, because it is a closed, proprietary standard? That’s right, flash. Everything else is an open standard. Again, it is hard to remove something that was never added to begin with. I recommend you read Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash Many of Apple’s arguments make perfect sense, and it seems like a reasonable decision to leave it out.
Although, I agree that the iPad missed the mark in many regards, I don’t blame Apple for leaving off flash. There are several native apps for the iPad that blow their flash, web-based counterpart out of the water both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. MLB At Bat and ABC apps are perfect examples with many more content providers making their sites flash-free, including ESPN, CNN, Disney, NY Times, Vimeo, National Geographic, etc. http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/
Finally, the app store dominates every other platform when it comes to gaming and makes on-line flash games look pathetic. And yes, there are even thousands of free games!