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Want to do a mini PSA that you should (probably) read Steve Jobs' biography if you haven't, it makes posts like this much, much more interesting when you have a

Want to do a mini PSA that you should (probably) read Steve Jobs' biography if you haven't, it makes posts like this much, much more interesting when you have a fuller background. I wasn't a Steve Jobs fan so I never read it till recently. Still not a huge fan, but you can still see the tendrils of his influence that still affect today's world (adobe flash EOL last year, this stuff by not allowing you to buy books on the kindle/amazon app on iphone, continuing to control hardware and software experience). And you can see how it's gone (4 different ipads, etc)

ethbr0 5y ago
I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Jobs deserves all the credit that goes his way for killing Flash. It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  How many bugs Flash had? Hundreds? Thousands? Anybody knows?
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    From a quick CVE search, less than 1,200 bugs ( https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=adobe+flash https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=adobe+flash ). For practical purposes, ~Aleph-nought.
    - mrkramer 5y ago
      Over 300 Flash bugs were discovered (and fixed) in 2015 alone: https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered_this_year-blog-15780.php https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered...
- yarcob 5y ago
  Poor performance on Mac was also an issue. Web browsers on the Mac were held back by the fact that Adobes plugin was extremely slow on the Mac, and Adobe didn't care. Apple could write the fastest web browser in the world, but it wouldn't matter if Flash on the Mac had only a fraction of the performance of the Windows version. It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Ironically, that fastest web browser engine now determines the fates of apps on Apple's platform. At least, it prevents the building of alternative browsers like an iOS Firefox Gecko browser.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    I think his hands were somewhat tied on the iPhone honestly - flash apps were borderline unusable on the flagship Android headsets of the day. You had to install an alternate browser, the apps were designed for mouse-keyboard input rather than touchscreens, they were non-responsive, they lagged with the Qualcomm chips, and they absolutely ravaged your battery. It's no wonder Steve Jobs just decided not to straight up not the tech. The security concerns were just a convenient scapegoat.
- 0x456 5y ago
  A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...
- bityard 5y ago
  Jobs deserves credit for a lot of the way things went in the computing world but I don't think "killing flash" is one of them. Apple and Flash only (publicly) crossed paths when the iPhone was released in 2007. Even then, Flash was widely disliked by users for a bunch of very good reasons: * It was yet another thing to install. (Most non-tech-savvy users didn't know how to install a web browser, let alone a browser-specific plugin.) I was an "expert" computer user and I still had trouble getting it to work quite often. * Flash apps were very resource-hungry on the slow machines at the time. Not quite as bad as Java, but still pretty bad. You had to wait for them to load, and when they consumed an outsize amount of CPU and memory compared to the value delivered. * A lot of enterprise software started getting written in Flash (vSphere 6, anyone?). I feel bad for every IT department that had to put up with this. Of course, before and alongside that it was Java. * The Flash runtime was a huge source of computer-pwning exploits. "Click to play" flash was a good idea but about a decade too late to make any difference. No, Flash was never particularly well-liked by ANYONE except animators, web video game companies, and web ad companies. It was going to die eventually. Even if we were to accept "Jobs killed Flash" as true, that would make it one of his _least_ successful endeavors since Flash only went EOL this year, 14 years later!
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Java and Flash are great comparisons, as web / applet Java is pretty much the same market. My point being that Java felt like they were stewarding a platform seriously (admittedly, mostly towards enterprise priorities). Whereas Flash felt like they were saying yes to whatever their designer customers asked, and worrying about the details later. And IE is just being deprecated in many places. 14 years to EOL is a snap of the fingers on enterprise timescales.
    - lupire 5y ago
      ? Java applets failed faster than Flash.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile. Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was. Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later. As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform. I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.
  - jldugger 5y ago
    >The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform. In other venues, I've seen this described as "becoming 50 percent richer by being 10 percent less greedy."
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      90s Microsoft realized this, which is how Windows became Windows (making developers and partners lots and lots of money). And how 90s Apple decomposed, and only really turned it around by creating enough demand via consumer device market share that developers had to come back.
- dwild 5y ago
  > It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer. The amount of zero-days zero-click remote code execution that came out of iOS on the past few months... Zerodium had to stop buying zero-days for iOS last year, as they had too many of them. I means I won't say that Adobe did a great job on security, just that it wasn't a good justification to kill the whole product. Flash didn't get taken down because of security issue, but because of Jobs manipulative tactics.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked. Flash was not killed, it committed suicide. All Jobs did was keep the death throes off iOS.
    - dwild 5y ago
      > Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked. It was running pretty well 10 years on my LG Optimus One at the time, which was a cheap 200$ phone (not subsidized, I got it for 50$ because of a promotion that gave 100$ while it was 50$ off). Still remember a few years ago, a bunch of friends started to play on our group conversation on the cheap HTML5 games of Facebook... theses games were so simple, yet most were complaining of performance issue. That was on phones that was now few generations better, and not the entry-level ones either... Jobs knew how to control markets, we are on a thread about this. Flash was killed because he needed it to be killed to control the market.
- fortran77 5y ago
  But Jobs didn't kill it because of "security." He didn't like it because it allowed another way for people to write "applications" that could run on his phone, and a related issue of it being bad for battery life.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    That's not true. The original iPhone didn't have an App Store. Jobs was all in on Progressive Web Apps and thought the future was going to web applications that ran natively in Safari. That's why he initially wanted things like Flash to work on iPhone. He didn't give up on that until Adobe called his bluff and major developers refused to move to mobile. He very begrudgingly introduced the App Store in the next iOS version after he realized that they needed it.
shrimpx 5y ago
I spent half a day watching multiple Jobs interviews on YouTube and there is an interesting effect across these interviews: the interviewers sound dated in their assumptions, while Jobs sounds fresh and contemporary. Even though these interviews were 20-30 years ago. One example is when Steve is being grilled about buying a “search engine company” called “Siri” and the surrounding rumors being certain that Apple obviously bought this search company to go to war with Google. Steve laughed and said “that’s not a search company, it’s an AI company.”
- justapassenger 5y ago
  TBH, I wouldn't call Siri a search company nor an AI company. They were (and still are, a decade later) mediocre at both.
  - cruano 5y ago
    Ah yes, I also don't think of walmart as a retailer because I don't like it
    - justapassenger 5y ago
      It's not about liking it. It's about having abilities to support your value proposition.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      In my experience, Siri has basically only provided my results from another search engine, WolframAlpha, or an API I'm not allowed to see/use. If that's artificial intelligence, then I'm Issac Asimov.
  - addicted 5y ago
    They were ahead of the pack when Apple bought them. Then Apple spent a year or so making them remove and reduce their functionality and then release a gimped version that was nonetheless integrated into the OS.
markstos 5y ago
What's the issue with four iPad models? iPads practically are the tablet market. Is four options too many? There were dozens of different Android tablets at the peak. That didn't go well for any of the Android tablet vendors.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  I follow Apple news a lot and still get confused with the differences between each iPads nowadays. iPad Pro.. iPad Air.. iPad "normal". iPad mini is the only one easy to understand. Some models support Apple Pencil 1st gen... some models support Apple Pencil 2nd gen. WHYYYYYY? It should all be the same. Which iPad support the smart keyboard? What about the "magic" keyboard?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    They are now doing the same thing with iPhones. 12 and 12 Pro were identical phones. 13 and 13 Pro are identical phones. Yes, there are differences in cameras, but that's really about as far as the difference goes.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      "These are exactly the same if you ignore the differences."
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        The "differences" are in some very minor specs that don't matter to the absolute vast majority of people.
        dkonofalski 5y ago
        If they didn't matter to the vast majority of people then they wouldn't sell them every year in record-breaking numbers.
duxup 5y ago
IMO Flash was as big a mess as Steve said it was at the time and it was already time to move on from it. It was mess even on the desktop (if my browser crashed, it was almost always flash). Adobe let it get that way and there it was.
77pt77 5y ago
If you want really revealing information read the redacted security clearance investigation. https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf

ethbr0 5y ago

I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Jobs deserves all the credit that goes his way for killing Flash. It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.

mrkramer 5y ago
How many bugs Flash had? Hundreds? Thousands? Anybody knows?
- bell-cot 5y ago
  From a quick CVE search, less than 1,200 bugs ( https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=adobe+flash https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=adobe+flash ). For practical purposes, ~Aleph-nought.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Over 300 Flash bugs were discovered (and fixed) in 2015 alone: https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered_this_year-blog-15780.php https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered...
yarcob 5y ago
Poor performance on Mac was also an issue. Web browsers on the Mac were held back by the fact that Adobes plugin was extremely slow on the Mac, and Adobe didn't care. Apple could write the fastest web browser in the world, but it wouldn't matter if Flash on the Mac had only a fraction of the performance of the Windows version. It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Ironically, that fastest web browser engine now determines the fates of apps on Apple's platform. At least, it prevents the building of alternative browsers like an iOS Firefox Gecko browser.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  I think his hands were somewhat tied on the iPhone honestly - flash apps were borderline unusable on the flagship Android headsets of the day. You had to install an alternate browser, the apps were designed for mouse-keyboard input rather than touchscreens, they were non-responsive, they lagged with the Qualcomm chips, and they absolutely ravaged your battery. It's no wonder Steve Jobs just decided not to straight up not the tech. The security concerns were just a convenient scapegoat.
0x456 5y ago
A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...
bityard 5y ago
Jobs deserves credit for a lot of the way things went in the computing world but I don't think "killing flash" is one of them. Apple and Flash only (publicly) crossed paths when the iPhone was released in 2007. Even then, Flash was widely disliked by users for a bunch of very good reasons: * It was yet another thing to install. (Most non-tech-savvy users didn't know how to install a web browser, let alone a browser-specific plugin.) I was an "expert" computer user and I still had trouble getting it to work quite often. * Flash apps were very resource-hungry on the slow machines at the time. Not quite as bad as Java, but still pretty bad. You had to wait for them to load, and when they consumed an outsize amount of CPU and memory compared to the value delivered. * A lot of enterprise software started getting written in Flash (vSphere 6, anyone?). I feel bad for every IT department that had to put up with this. Of course, before and alongside that it was Java. * The Flash runtime was a huge source of computer-pwning exploits. "Click to play" flash was a good idea but about a decade too late to make any difference. No, Flash was never particularly well-liked by ANYONE except animators, web video game companies, and web ad companies. It was going to die eventually. Even if we were to accept "Jobs killed Flash" as true, that would make it one of his _least_ successful endeavors since Flash only went EOL this year, 14 years later!
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Java and Flash are great comparisons, as web / applet Java is pretty much the same market. My point being that Java felt like they were stewarding a platform seriously (admittedly, mostly towards enterprise priorities). Whereas Flash felt like they were saying yes to whatever their designer customers asked, and worrying about the details later. And IE is just being deprecated in many places. 14 years to EOL is a snap of the fingers on enterprise timescales.
  - lupire 5y ago
    ? Java applets failed faster than Flash.
kmeisthax 5y ago
I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile. Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was. Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later. As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform. I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.
- jldugger 5y ago
  >The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform. In other venues, I've seen this described as "becoming 50 percent richer by being 10 percent less greedy."
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    90s Microsoft realized this, which is how Windows became Windows (making developers and partners lots and lots of money). And how 90s Apple decomposed, and only really turned it around by creating enough demand via consumer device market share that developers had to come back.
dwild 5y ago
> It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer. The amount of zero-days zero-click remote code execution that came out of iOS on the past few months... Zerodium had to stop buying zero-days for iOS last year, as they had too many of them. I means I won't say that Adobe did a great job on security, just that it wasn't a good justification to kill the whole product. Flash didn't get taken down because of security issue, but because of Jobs manipulative tactics.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked. Flash was not killed, it committed suicide. All Jobs did was keep the death throes off iOS.
  - dwild 5y ago
    > Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked. It was running pretty well 10 years on my LG Optimus One at the time, which was a cheap 200$ phone (not subsidized, I got it for 50$ because of a promotion that gave 100$ while it was 50$ off). Still remember a few years ago, a bunch of friends started to play on our group conversation on the cheap HTML5 games of Facebook... theses games were so simple, yet most were complaining of performance issue. That was on phones that was now few generations better, and not the entry-level ones either... Jobs knew how to control markets, we are on a thread about this. Flash was killed because he needed it to be killed to control the market.
fortran77 5y ago
But Jobs didn't kill it because of "security." He didn't like it because it allowed another way for people to write "applications" that could run on his phone, and a related issue of it being bad for battery life.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  That's not true. The original iPhone didn't have an App Store. Jobs was all in on Progressive Web Apps and thought the future was going to web applications that ran natively in Safari. That's why he initially wanted things like Flash to work on iPhone. He didn't give up on that until Adobe called his bluff and major developers refused to move to mobile. He very begrudgingly introduced the App Store in the next iOS version after he realized that they needed it.

shrimpx 5y ago

I spent half a day watching multiple Jobs interviews on YouTube and there is an interesting effect across these interviews: the interviewers sound dated in their assumptions, while Jobs sounds fresh and contemporary. Even though these interviews were 20-30 years ago. One example is when Steve is being grilled about buying a “search engine company” called “Siri” and the surrounding rumors being certain that Apple obviously bought this search company to go to war with Google. Steve laughed and said “that’s not a search company, it’s an AI company.”

justapassenger 5y ago
TBH, I wouldn't call Siri a search company nor an AI company. They were (and still are, a decade later) mediocre at both.
- cruano 5y ago
  Ah yes, I also don't think of walmart as a retailer because I don't like it
  - justapassenger 5y ago
    It's not about liking it. It's about having abilities to support your value proposition.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    In my experience, Siri has basically only provided my results from another search engine, WolframAlpha, or an API I'm not allowed to see/use. If that's artificial intelligence, then I'm Issac Asimov.
- addicted 5y ago
  They were ahead of the pack when Apple bought them. Then Apple spent a year or so making them remove and reduce their functionality and then release a gimped version that was nonetheless integrated into the OS.

markstos 5y ago

What's the issue with four iPad models? iPads practically are the tablet market. Is four options too many? There were dozens of different Android tablets at the peak. That didn't go well for any of the Android tablet vendors.

jeromegv 5y ago
I follow Apple news a lot and still get confused with the differences between each iPads nowadays. iPad Pro.. iPad Air.. iPad "normal". iPad mini is the only one easy to understand. Some models support Apple Pencil 1st gen... some models support Apple Pencil 2nd gen. WHYYYYYY? It should all be the same. Which iPad support the smart keyboard? What about the "magic" keyboard?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  They are now doing the same thing with iPhones. 12 and 12 Pro were identical phones. 13 and 13 Pro are identical phones. Yes, there are differences in cameras, but that's really about as far as the difference goes.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    "These are exactly the same if you ignore the differences."
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      The "differences" are in some very minor specs that don't matter to the absolute vast majority of people.
      - dkonofalski 5y ago
        If they didn't matter to the vast majority of people then they wouldn't sell them every year in record-breaking numbers.

duxup 5y ago

IMO Flash was as big a mess as Steve said it was at the time and it was already time to move on from it. It was mess even on the desktop (if my browser crashed, it was almost always flash). Adobe let it get that way and there it was.

77pt77 5y ago

If you want really revealing information read the redacted security clearance investigation. https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf