Why I will never buy Apple products

I found this piece of news so amusing, that I just had to give my own thoughts about it. Read how Steve Jobs spews nonsense in regards to Adobe Flash. In this article, Steve Jobs reiterates for the N-th time why Apple's mobile devices refuse to adopt the usage of Adobe Flash; I hope you find the article as amusing as I did.

To summarize, the article mentions Jobs' recent outburst on how evil Adobe Flash is, constantly crashing their beloved overpriced Mac machines. Now I don't use Mac machines (and I refuse to) so I can't comment on this but so I'll leave that particular statement alone. He also said that Flash was a CPU hog and had too many vulnerabilities for comfort; I'll give him that much as well. Fact is, Flash can't help but use the CPU to run it's complex operations. Never being all that good a programmer, I can't vouch for nor denounce Flash's capability as a program but I do know that it is a poorly optimized application. I do know about news that Adobe is working on a way to offload the loading of Flash applications to the GPU but that's just making the GPU take all the heat instead of reducing the heat; the underlying issue is not dealt with at all.

Before I go on, I'd like to say I'm not picking sides here. Fact is, I dislike both Adobe's Flash and in general all Apple products. Flash is all people complain it to be: slow and buggy. Where else Apple products are simply too expensive and just don't make sense monetary wise. The 27-inch iMac is closed to RM7,000 last I check and with that amount of budget I could probably get a PC 50% more powerful; that's just how overpriced Macs are. On Flash, web UIs developed by that tend to be seriously bloated and generally takes longer to load compared to other sites. As far as end users go, we only tend to experience or use Flash when we visit video streaming sites or the various Flash games you find online like those in Facebook.

Getting back to the article, Jobs actually claimed that Apple was responsible for getting people to ditch Floppy drives and old data ports, which is simply ridiculous and also oddly amusing; I guess his stupidity and ignorance just makes me wanna burst out laughing. Last I checked, I ditched Floppy drives simply because floppy discs can only store a meager 1.44MB of data, which is just too little for modern use. Old data ports were just part of the evolutionary process of computer components; USB was introduced to the world, giving serial and parallel ports no other choice than to become a thing of the past.

Anyway, Jobs went on to say that Apple will make people ditch Flash as well and like the other claims he made, I just don't see how. Is Steve Jobs even sober or sane when he made those statements? I think many of us who don't worship Jobs realize how the guy is stuck in his own Reality Distortion Field (hello Steve, wake up and smell the coffee will ya?). To put it otaku terms, Steve Jobs is stuck in his own Reality Marble and he wants to drag everyone else in.

I have no doubts that there are many people on the Apple camp who worship and advocate Apple products "just because"; that's the reason you hear many people give when you ask them why they bought an Apple product. Other statements he spouted whilst being delusional were like "creating videos with H.264 is trivial" which is something else I don't wanna comment on due to my lack of knowledge in H.264. But as far as I remember H.264 only does videos, I wasn't told that it could suddenly create game applications or be used to create web UIs (granted Flash-based websites are a pain to load).

Where did all these hoohah come from? Well basically the iPad was partially involved. With the release of the ridiculously named tablet device, the question once again sprung up "will the iPad support Adobe Flash?" To which a very annoyed Jobs said "no". Why? Because apparently the iPad's battery life of 10 hours would be reduced to only 1.5 hours if it were to run Flash apps or used to browse Flash-based sites. Honestly, if the iPad were to be used to run even any sort of video programs, I doubt it'd last 1.5 hours anyway. Heck, can it even run for 10 hours in the first place? 10 hours completely idle maybe, which is definitely not a good way to measure battery life.

Is there a point? Not really, I just wanted to let people know what's going on and what I think about it. While it's true that Flash has many problems, we'll still see a lot of people using it until HTML5's adoption increases and even then it'll not entirely eliminate the need for Flash. What Steve Jobs seems to want to do here is to do exactly that though, with his statement that Apple will make people abandon Flash. Will they come up with something better? Or are they putting all their hopes on HTML5? Honestly, only time will tell.

For now, I'm just happy that I'm sane and clever enough to know that the iPhone is nothing without the app store (in fact it'll be an inferior phone), which would also be nothing if Apple allowed Flash on their mobile devices. Coincidence? I think not.