Jobs says Flash would cut iPad battery by 80 per cent

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Apple supremo Steve Jobs has slammed Adobe's Flash video platform as being a CPU hog, and claims Flash support would reduce the iPad's battery life by as much as 80 per cent.

The two companies have been trading verbal blows over the Apple tablet's inability to work with Flash since the device was launched last month.

New details are now emerging of a meeting between Jobs and the Wall Street Journal that saw Jobs wasting no time in making feelings about Flash known.

Meeting the newspaper as part of a media tour to promote the iPad shortly after its launch, industry gossip blog Valleywag claims that Jobs again said Flash was responsible for the majority of Mac crashes, and dismissed it as “a dying technology”.

Furthermore, during the meeting Jobs allegedly called Flash “a CPU hog”, “a source of security holes” and said support for the resource-hungry Flash would reduce the iPad's 10-hour battery life to as little as 90 minutes.

Trying to sell the appeal of the iPad to the WSJ, Jobs reportedly said dropping Flash as its video delivery method in favour of the iPad-supported H.264 or HTML5 would be a “trivial” matter, and compared Flash to other systems Apple had outlasted, such as floppy disks, FireWire 400 and CDs. “We don't spend a lot of time on old technology,” he was quoted as saying.

A lack of Flash support is believed by many to be the only serious flaw with the iPhone, given that 85 per cent of top websites deliver video content using Flash.

However, the launch of the video-friendly iPad pushed the debate into the public eye, with Adobe blaming a lack of cooperation from Apple for the standoff, and Jobs responding by calling Adobe lazy for producing unreliable, resource-hungry software.

And it seems neither side is willing to let the argument go. An Adobe blog post last week claimed that a dedicated page telling iPhone users that their phones didn't support Flash had seven million hits in December, implying that seven million iPhone owners had tried to download Flash, not knowing it wasn't supported.

“We were amazed by the numbers of hits received from iPhone OS devices, from users seeking the Flash Player to play back rich content from their favourite sites," Adobe's Mark Doherty wrote. “Users that, before we created the special page, had no idea that Apple do not want them viewing the internet as they see it today.”

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