As those of you following the new MacBook Air may know, Apple decided to ship the wafer-thin laptop without Adobe Flash, yet another log into the Apple-hates-Flash fire. However, instead of excluding Flash for no other reason than keeping with the anti-Flash trend, reviews of the MacBook Air over at Ars Technica indicate that having Flash installed can cut the battery life by a third, providing a possible practical reason as to why Flash didn’t make the cut.
According to the Ars Technica review, having Flash installed kept the MacBook Air’s CPU running longer than necessary, providing a total battery life of about four hours; with Flash uninstalled, however, the battery life shot up to around six hours, a pretty significant increase in terms of mobile electronics battery life.
Steve Jobs mentioned Flash’s possible negative impact on battery life before, claiming that the iPad would drop to a paltry 1.5 hours of battery life if it had Flash, and now this Ars Technica review seems to show that the MacBook Air would lose around two hours. Maybe Apple’s campaign against Flash isn’t born out of stubbornness after all?
(Ars Technica via Wired)
