Flash plugin absence on MacBook Air was deliberate, says Apple

My new 27" iMac just arrived, no flash in Safari. Looks like it isn't just the MBA, but an across the board stance.

Clearly this is Apple continuing to move away from or rather push Flash out of the way. I agree on many of the points Apple has regarding Flash. I would be fine if we all moved away from it. It's old out dated from the ground up software. Replace it with the new technology...

A computer without flash is a good computer. Thanks Apple!

It may not be as easy for Mac newbies to get there hands on flash but this ensures the most up to date version of flash will be installed.

I normally activate ClickToFlash in order to use Flash only when absolutely necessary. But I've noticed recently that when ClickToFlash is off—that is to say, when Flash is operating "normally"—it quits with some regularity. And at no extra charge!

Who cares. These are the worst 2 plugins that I've ever used. I had Flash forever, and it seems to be getting slow. Recently I installed Silverlight for the first time (to watch some live sports on a website that needed it). I noticed that it was the slowest loading component on the page.

So I did an experiment with Flash with this observation in mind. I uninstalled Flash, and went to some of my favorite websites. Wow, they load fast (the whole page due to the Flash Ads that are now unloadable). Then I reinstalled Flash, went to the same websites. Whoa, the pages now load slower, not only the Flash Ads, but most pages do not load the remainder of the page until some Flash Ads are loaded first!

Conclusion, these plug-ins suck. I'd rather have natively supported platforms on my web browser.

As I understand it Apple will insist in future that only their installer is used. If Adobe offered a DMG download with no strings attached, and put it in software update to track releases I don't think there would be problem...

Adobe should be partially worried. For one thing when Apple drops something they usually have good reason and that technology usually goes away.

They were the first to drop floppy drives and thanks to USB drives and bigger email attachment limits and services like Steam and Netflix there's little need for optical drives in computers anymore. Which makes me wonder how HP intends to get MS Office onto their new slate unless they're going to force everyone to buy an add-on optical drive.

And don't think for a minute that the Mac App Store is just a new hobby for Apple. They're basically planning to apply the Flash-less world of iOS devices to the Mac and there's no reason to think they can't/won't succeed.

I'm curious to find out if the Air battery life diminishes after installing Flash.

This goes right along with deprecating support for Java. I expect in 10.7, Flash and Java will just be add-ons like all other OSes. Apple may be like the package maintainers where I work: fed up with the labor involved with constantly repacking them for distribution. Leaving it up to Adobe means no more dings for Apple, and possibly better inroads to the enterprise market.