Think different
===============

Thursday 22 July 2010 16:00

In the old days batteries sucked and there were no
CPU's targeted for mobile use, so battery life
could be very short. But that was no problem
because if you needed to do a lot on the road you
could just charge a whole bunch of battery packs
and swap a flat one for a fresh one and keep going.
What Apple is doing is first preventing it's users
from leveraging this scalable power solution by
making it impossible to swap the battery, and then
using that artificially limited power supply as an
argument to keep apparently power hungry
applications from their mobile devices. It's all so
flawed when you look further than the shiny bits
and think about it.

There is of course a point about CPU use and
limited power supply. But anything executable on a
device has to use the CPU and can drain it in a way
the user doesn't want at that point. JavaScript can
drain a CPU just as much as Flash. The solution to
this is to give the user the option to prevent
executable stuff from executing. Whether it is
JavaScript, Java, XSLT or Flash. If Flash is really
a problem for battery life people will be smart
enough to disable it for sites in which Flash adds
less value than the power it consumes, while still
being able to have Flash drain their battery when
it's worth it, just like any other technology.

Power consumption is no reason to ban Flash from a
platform altogether.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2010/07/22/think-different/