Hasta La Gadget!

Well, Steve Jobs just dropped a little nugget of history on us during his chat with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things D conference. When asked by Walt why they originally put their new OS on a phone and not a tablet, Steve said, “I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet.” After working on the tablet OS which had a glass display and multitouch, another idea occurred to Jobs. “My God, I said, this would make a great phone … so we shelved the tablet and built the iPhone.” And there you have it.

Steve Jobs: iPhone OS ‘started on a tablet’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Said Steve: “We are on top of this. We look at everything at these companies. I can tell you a few things that we know. And we are all over this. Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory — but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides — and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Steve also said that Apple’s “got people” over at Foxconn currently trying to figure out what’s going on — we figured as much but it’s always good to hear it straight from them.

Steve Jobs on Foxconn: ‘We’re all over this’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s hard to say if today’s protest outside of the Computex show floor has anything in particular to do with Taiwan’s president showing up to tour the expo, but there’s zero doubt that it has a lot to do with the recent attention given to questionable labor practices in Foxconn’s Chinese facilities. A good two dozen protesters were out in force today, with loads of police and TV cameras giving the world a look at how these folks feel about Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Wintek’s CEO in particular. As for Jobs, he was being labeled an “OEM profit bloodsucker” and “the man behind irresponsible contractors,” while a slew of others were deemed “production line killers, number one union butchers, representatives of mass layoffs and kings of chemical killing.” We also spotted instances of “tired to death” and “suicide overtime work,” neither of which are particularly rosy. Hit the gallery below for more of the mayhem.

Labor practice protest goes down at Computex, Steve Jobs called an ‘OEM profit bloodsucker’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to show Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt making nice. After all, life is too short for bitter personal relationships. And you responded with some really hilarious images. More »

Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple’s position on Flash, going back to his company’s long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. Here’s the breakdown:

• It’s not open. “While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.” Man, that’s some strong irony you’re brewing, Steve. Still, we get the point — HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript are open web standards.
• The “full web.” Steve hits back at Adobe’s claim of Apple devices missing out on “the full web,” with an age-old argument (YouTube) aided by the numerous new sources that have started providing video to the iPhone and iPad in HTML5 or app form like CBS, Netflix, and Facebook. Oh, and as for flash games? “50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free.” If we were keeping score we’d still call this a point for Adobe.
• Reliability, security and performance. Steve hits on the usual “Flash is the number one reason Macs crash,” but adds another great point on top of this: “We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” You’ve got us there, Steve, but surely your magical A4 chip could solve all this?
• Battery life. “The video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software.” Steve Jobs is of course H.264’s #1 fan, and it’s hard to blame him, since he cites 10 hours of H.264 playback but only 5 hours with software decode on the iPhone. Still, those “older generation” sites that haven’t moved to H.264 yet are pretty much the exact same sites that aren’t viewable with HTML5, which means we’re being restricted in the content we can access just because some of it doesn’t perform as well.
• Touch. Steve hits hard against one of the web’s greatest hidden evils: rollovers. Basically, Flash UIs are built around the idea of mouse input, and would need to be “rewritten” to work well on touch devices. “If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” That doesn’t really address the Flash-as-app scenario (that’s point #6), but it’s also a pretty silly sounding solution to a developer: your website doesn’t support this one UI paradigm exactly right, so why not rewrite it entirely?
• The most important reason. Steve finally addresses the third party development tools situation, but it’s really along the lines of what we were hearing already: “If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.” We doubt this will end all debate, but it’s clear Apple has a line in the sand.

He concludes in saying that “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice.” Basically, it’s for the olds. And you don’t want to be old, do you? Follow after the break for the whole thing in brilliant prose form.

Continue reading Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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