MattSnodBlog

There's been a lot of talk as of late about the battle heating up between Apple and Adobe. In particular, Apple's decision not to support Adobe's Flash plug-in on some of its best-selling devices like the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the upcoming iPad.

At a meeting with Wall Street Journal executives, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Flash a "CPU hog" (it is) and didn't build the iPad to support it. Adobe retaliated on its blog, pointing out how the iPad isn't really a good way to experience the Internet if so much of the Web uses Flash (it does).

Frankly, I think this less about Apple's quibble with Adobe and more about their storied tradition of abandoning technologies that, frankly, were on their way out. Apple just sees these demises sooner than most and usually gets pilloried for their efforts. Let's take a look:

• Floppy drive: In 1998 Apple officially dumped the diskette with the introduction of the iMac. Thank you!
• SCSI: The only thing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices was ... okay, there was nothing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices. I'm serious.
• Serial port: Hey, the printer's not printing. Can I unplug the serial port and plug it back in? No, that's worse than crossing the streams.
• ADB port: Okay, the Apple Desktop Bus was their fault in the first place. No harm, no foul.
• Modem: Anyone who remembers what "baud" is, has no love loss for modems ... or this sound.
• Firewire400: It was getting slow, and if you accidentally plugged it in backwards, you could fry your device.
• PCMCIA: This laptop cardbus was about as fast as physically shoveling the data onto your computer. Apple did the right thing by dropping it for Express34 and then the wrong thing by dropping that for SD.

Perhaps Flash is just another in a long line of soon-to-be-aging technologies in which Apple is first to recognize their inevitable obsolescence. If you've ever checked your task manager (Windows) or activity monitor (Mac) while running a Web page with Flash, you've seen how much of a resource hog it can be.

In case you hadn't heard (he said with a fair amount of sarcasm), Apple announced its tablet PC, the iPad, the other day. Since we're drowning in post-announcement commentary, the likes of which we've not seen since we found out who shot J.R., I'll just stick to the top-line stuff here.

Overall, I like it. It's sleek, simple, and ... Apple. While some of the negative post-event buzz has been that it's an "oversized iPod Touch," I say, is that a bad thing? The iPod Touch (and iPhone) is awesome. Why not have a larger version of these mega-hit devices for bigger browsing, bigger e-mail-checking, and bigger content-consuming? The iPad seems like the perfect "schlep-around-with-you-everywhere" device.

PROS:

• Super thin and super light
• Touch keyboard that's like the iPhone/iPod Touch, only full-sized
• Expect some pretty cool iPad-sized apps coming down the pike
• Really good battery life
• Great new iTunes experience
• Cool print content experience, like the NY Times they showed
• Fingerprint-less screen

CONS:

• No SD card slot built-in
• No USB (not even USB micro)
• No built-in GPS
• No camera
• No drag-and-drop file management
• No file creation -- only viewing (I'd love to be able to edit documents and presentations with it.)
• No OLED screen (seemed an obvious choice at this stage of the game)
• No 16:9 aspect ratio for viewing wide-screen movies
• Touch keyboard (for those of you who won't give up your Blackberry-style keyboards)

Let's face it, at this point, Steve Jobs could have taken a dump on stage, and people would be ooh'ing and aah'ing, their stock would have gone up 5%, and David Pogue would be fawning all over it. In the end, Apple does do these product innovations pretty well. They haven't stumbled in a long time. Bottom line ... I want one, and so do you.

Can you smell it? A storm's a brewin'. You can almost see on the horizon that something ugly is headed our way. It's an all-out, knock-down brawl between Apple and Google.

Business Week ran a great article last week on this, and it's evident that something's gotta give. Let's face it, as the years progress, each is encroaching on the other's sandbox.

• Apple comes out with a phone OS, Google comes out with Android.
• Apple releases the iPhone, Google releases the Nexus One.
• Apple develops their Safari Web browser, Google comes out with Chrome.
• Google acquires mobile advertising company AdMob, Apple goes after Quattro Wireless.
• Apple works with TomTom on a for-pay GPS app, Google offers their turn-by-turn directions for free.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down as Apple board member last year.

Expect more tough back and forth between these two as the phone carrier wars heat up later this year when Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T expires.

Imagine you're a consumer electronics company -- one of the biggest -- and you make the conscious decision each year not to go to the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest of its kind in the States. Apple does this, and it amazes me.

Nearly every other big (and medium and small) technology company feels that it's a business imperative to take a booth in Vegas each January ... but not Apple. Are they bold? Brazen? Stupid? Brilliant? What do you think?