Comment by UnknownSource | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UnknownSource | Hacker News Reader

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that ARM is competing against the faster atom processors, which can run windows and a lot more applications? I would have thought that consumers would see an Atom netbook, compare it to ARM, realise the minimal cost difference and then settle on the Atom based one.

It sounds like they are simply fishing for excuses honestly. Flash may make ARM netbook's more appealing, but if this was the sole reason that they were delayed, the companies interested in creating smartbooks would have simply released the products now, and introduced a flash update later.

I think it probably has more to do with lack of demand. Whilst the ARM processors are good mobile phone CPU's, for laptops/netbooks, it is simply a trade-off of compatibility for slightly lower cost, and it would have to be a significant reduction in cost for salespeople to recommend a foreign processor.

That's just my opinion though. Personally, I used to sell laptops, and I would much rather push Atom netbooks than ARM netbooks.

I would argue that the smartphone market (and indeed any non-standard desktop OS or hardware) was also held up by lack of Flash support.

You have Intel executives banging on about "the whole internet" or the "real internet" etc. in other words don't buy that (or invest money in offering them for sale) as they don't run Flash. That was their one big talking point against ARM. They even slagged off the iPhone for this despite Apple being a big customer of theirs in other areas.

Intel Blasts iPhone: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10072779-37.html

ZeroGravitas. Apple also banged on in 2004 about how awesome PowerPC was compared to Intel. Remind me what happened 2 years later? Yes, companies do slag others off..

The smartphone market was held up for many other reasons too. It mostly came down to the fact that the mobile OS's sucked at the time. One would have also expected Android/iPhone sales to have been flat without flash support, and this is untrue (Apple have said they refuse to support Flash, and iPhones are unfortunately flying off the shelves).

If you think Flash will suddenly replace the fact that software support for ARM is limited, that the CPU's are slow (and only recently started operating at good enough speeds) and that no major OS's even support ARM (Windows, Ubuntu, redhat, many other major linux distro's) then you should perhaps list EXACTLY what you think consumers need flash for (youtube perhaps would have been one valid reason, but it has been accessible via other means since at least 2006 now).

Whilst technologies such as Flash and ActiveX do still have their uses (hopefully though HTML5 will kill flash), I doubt that the lack of flash would have influenced any manufacturers into delaying an ARM product (which would be slightly cheaper), if they were serious.

Lets face it, The major issues with the iPhone 2G was the lack of applications (and even a javascript refreshing security camera stream caused safari to crash) and on Windows Mobile it was general usability issues. Or do you think these problems would have magically disappeared because of a really-slow version of Flash?

If there's X things that make a market look unlikely to succeed and so prevent investment, then things are going to develop even slower if it's X+1 instead. Poor Flash support is just one more thing that hampered smartphones, just as it hampered Linux. I'm not saying either were perfect if you ignore Flash support.

My point with Intel is that they're going to choose the very worst aspects of their competitors to talk about. If ARM phones could kill your pets, or explode in your face, then Intel would be talking about that. The fact that they were talking about Flash support means that it must have been, in their opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of ARM in the smartphone space.

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