Most pundits believed that Apple omitted Adobe Flash from its new MacBook Air due to the Flash vs. HTML5 war the companies are waging. It turns out that there’s a more practical reason for the snub: battery life. According to Ars Technica, the Air gets more than 33 percent more juice without Flash than with it. Here’s the deal:
Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02—with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.
Prettty crazy, hey? The whole thing has me rethinking my position on Flash-based advertising. What do you think of The Situation the situation?
