Flash Kills the MacBook Air Battery 33% Faster
Flash could make a battery go in a flash.
When Apple shipped its latest MacBook Air laptops without Flash preinstalled, it gave the explanation that it would rather users installed Flash themselves so that they could get the latest, most secure version.
This is a plausible explanation because often times Apple fails to include the latest build of Flash even in its most recent Mac OS X updates. The latest builds of Flash include GPU video acceleration – something that current Mac users have to upgrade themselves if they want the feature.
There could be another very big reason that Apple left out Flash in its latest, thinnest laptops, and that would be battery life.
In Ars Technica's tests of the 11-inch model, it found that the little laptop survived 4 hours of Safari web browsing with Flash enabled. With Flash taken out of the system, the laptop ran for just over 6 hours.
Apple quotes a 5 hour battery life for this particular MacBook Air, so real world numbers appear to be within a close range of that. Still, for those on the go with a new MacBook Air, is it worth sacrificing a third of your battery life for Flash?
Perhaps the best solution would be to have Flash disabled elements until the user decides to display them, like Click to Flash.
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I imagine that running around Half Life 2 instead of sat on the desktop would also drain the battery quicker. Having moving interactive images that refresh 20-30 times a second, and constantly run code in the background, will ALWAYS consume more power, both by the screen and processor. Why buy a computer at all, you can browse a paperback book without EVER having to charge it.... This is the MOST stupid thing I have ever seen reported in the mainstream computer press, most people buy computers, to you know... compute stuff, not just to consume (though I can't speak for the average Macbook air purchaser).
Mostly irrelevant statistic - I personally can't think of a situation where I'd use a MCA for longer than 4 hours and not have an electrical socket near to me.
Same goes with ANY notebook.
@longerlife - I think you missed something slightly fundamental. If you play Half Life, you are doing something DIFFERENT to reading a book.
If you browse a website, with or without flash on, you are still browsing a website. The same action is resulting in a different battery life result. You mention that flash refreshes 20-30 times a second, but that just explains WHY the battery life is less, that doesn't excuse it. The flash on a lot of websites tends to be advertising, so the end user wont lose any functionality by disabling it. Arguing that flash is fundamentally inefficient (unnecessary refreshing) also suggests that it shouldn't be used.
@LePhuronn, don't be so narrow minded. Almost everyone who has any kind of remotely active life and gets out in the real world would appreciate more than 4 hours of battery life. Why be tied down to a socket when you can take your laptop outside, into a cafe, use it on the train (even ones without outlets) etc. And even if you found SOME of the above with sockets, wouldn't it be much nicer not to have to fumble around with leads before you can start working?
For me, a business professional, battery life is VERY important. I am often in situations where I don't have access to power for prolonged periods of time, and having a long battery life is a god send. And remember, even if this was only an hour or so each time, four of those and your laptop is dead, and your productivity ends.
Not only that, but even when I'm actually in my house and have access to power, it's FAR more convenient just to carry the laptop with me to the sofa or to a desk, without having to set up the power leads.
adobe need to get on board with html 5 and quick-ish... i can see a day in the not too distant future where flash will become a fully featured I.D.E. for generating html5 compliant content. i've never used the flash development environment, but there are a lot of people who have and say it is a very good development tool. if it generated html5 content then job done... yes html5 has a subset of flash's feature set in some situations but hey, deal with it...
the argument is "does flash add a meaningful amount to the web browsing experience".... the answer to that in my opinion is increasingly becoming "not really.."
the macbook air may have been demonstrated to have increased battery life without flash, but all laptops will be similar... load up performance monitor in windows and browse to certain flash content websites and watch your cpu processing occupancy go up quickly!!!! not good for portable battery based computers...