A traditional hard drive isn’t the only thing missing from the brand new MacBook Air — Adobe Flash plugins are also missing from Apple’s latest pint-sized creation.
As first noted by Engadget, the MacBook Air eschews long-standing Mac OS X tradition and does not include a pre-installed version of Adobe Flash player. It may seem as though the Apple/Adobe war over Flash is extending to the desktop.
The initiative will first take effect on new MacBook Airs before affecting future shipments of other Macs as well. No one is precluded from installing Flash Player 10.1 themselves, however; it just means that Mac OS X will no longer ship with Flash Player already installed.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple has traditionally included a version of Flash Player on both its machines and Mac OS X retail discs. This meant that users didn’t have to visit adobe.com/flashplayer to enjoy their YouTube videos or adultswim.com games.
Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Engadget, “We’re happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.”
In the past, Apple has been criticized for including outdated versions of Flash in its OS updates. This is less of an issue when the outdated versions just don’t have as many bells and whistles, but can be cause for concern when security exploits are discovered in the shipping versions.
The end user experience isn’t likely to change very much — you’ll just need to download Flash on your new Mac instead of checking for the latest updated version. Still, this is a clear sign that Apple plans to continue pushing its core technologies over those produced by third parties.
For instance, Mac Rumors has also reported on Apple’s decision to stop future development of its own ports of Java for Mac OS X. Again, this doesn’t mean that Apple is saying developers can’t use Java on the Mac, but the company will no longer maintain its own Java port.
A concerned Java developer contacted Steve Jobs. Jobs responded, “Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.”
Presumably Oracle can start providing its own Mac OS X builds for Java, or community implementations of Java 6 and OpenJDK can step in. As John Gruber notes, there is a difference between Java on the server and Java on the desktop. That doesn’t mean professional Java developers won’t still want to use Mac OS X to do their work.
While Apple isn’t forbidding the usage of either Flash or Java on the desktop, doing less to include consumer support out of the box makes it clear that native applications (Cocoa, Objective-C) and web standards are where Apple wants to shift its users.
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