I said I was going to stay out of this, but I just want to add a few points. (Also, my head is no longer close to exploding. I discovered how to triple my productivity.)


They may in a few months. Until then, the knowledge that another handset may support Flash and that the iPhone definitely never will might influence people.


If a web page embeds a PDF, what happens? I've not used an iPhone enough to know personally, but I'm guessing that it opens an external application. Why would that not work for embedded Flash applets? Or is Mobile Safari so closed that it cannot deal with any objects it doesn't have preexisting knowledge of?


By any metric, the vast majority of Flash content is video. Yes, many video sites are transitioning to HTML5, but that involves a lot of transcoding of source material that's not in a codec that HTML will handle (Sorenson Spark, mostly), and YouTube, which has a dedicated application on both Android and iPhone, hasn't done that yet, to the point that a large portion of their videos (personal anecdotal evidence) won't play on those devices, even with their dedicated applications. And forget about any other video site. A few have made some minor inroads into converting to HTML5, but Hulu, for example, hasn't, and probably never will. There are not enough restrictions on how the content can be played back for them to be able to switch. And that discounts any Flash animation, which, as far as I'm aware, is completely unsupported by any mobile device. It's doubtful that many, if any, would make a smartphone choice based on whether they could watch HomestarRunner or not, but I think all would agree that would rather have the opportunity than not.


Assuming that's true, which is debatable, that means that any product that consumers aren't interested in shouldn't be allowed to reach market. Yeah, okay, maybe consumers aren't interested. If they're not, then the product would fail on its own. If they are, then Apple is restricting the market. Besides, people make uninformed decisions all the time. I'm sure that there are a variety of people out there for whom Android would work better (say, people who are drenched in the Google Kool-Aid), but they got the iPhone anyway, because it was the one that everyone else had. Bandwagonism is a strong marketing force.

Ultimately, the arguments that are being made are "iPhone plus Flash is better than iPhone without Flash". Your argument is that "iPhone without Flash is better than iPhone with Flash". I think that's demonstrably untrue. This implies that applications that would have been made via Flash will instead be made via XCode, and that a bad application is worse than no application. You can make those arguments, but they are, at the very least, debatable.


Other than Doug's semi-facetious "it's not what I'm used to, therefore it's bad" posts, this is untrue. TonyC and I are probably your most vocal adversaries, and we both use MacBookPros as our everyday workstations. Others simply state "Apple is not for me". There are people who hate on Apple, but I'm not aware of any of them here.

The problem is that you see this where it doesn't exist. I think the iPad is a stupid device, and I think that refusing to support, nay, allow, Flash is a bad choice for users, at least in the short term. Further, it sets a bad precedent for other future technologies, and marks the iPhone as a closed platform even more so than we already knew. But that doesn't mean that I hate all things Apple, and the fact that you see that where it doesn't exist is far more indicative of fanboyism than a lack of criticism. (Do you love your wife unreservedly? Do you ever disagree with her? If so, disagreement does not imply lack of obsession.)