David Pogue relates the following tidbit from the private audience he and John Markoff had with Steve Jobs and the iPhone shortly after its introduction:
Markoff: “What about all those plugins that live within Safari now, like Flash or like Java or like JavaScript?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see [Flash].”
Markoff: “What about YouTube?”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”
Steve thinks you don’t need Flash to watch a YouTube video? What does “all you need to do is deal with YouTube” mean, exactly? YouTube, like a awful lot of sites today, delivers video from within a player built in Flash. We do that, among other reasons, so we don’t need to mess around with crap like Window Media. If Stevie J. wants those of us compelled to buy an iPhone for reasons we can’t easily explain to be able to view YouTube videos, then it’d had better support Flash.
Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, any web-browsing device that doesn’t support Flash just ain’t worth it. Even Opera’s Wii browser supports Flash (and can “deal with YouTube”). Come on, Steve. Snap out of it.