This guy has it figured out. Honestly, nobody should attribute any sort of sainthood to the folks in Cupertino (and as somebody who was one of them for three years, I oughta know) but to pretend like Adobe is some innocent babe in the woods being done wrong by the Beast of Infinite Loop is the height of foolishness. I would think that the paste-eater cognoscenti would be thrilled to see somebody pushing back against proprietary technology in favor of reasonably open formats not under the control of any one company, but for some reason, pressing for HTML5 and H.264 to replace Flash has somehow become the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Hun butchering the Belgians.
Look, any idiot should have been able to figure this out by now: Apple, in the era of Jobs II, is not interested in being beholden to anyone else. I can only imagine how much it chafed Himself to have Bill Gates up there pledging to keep producing Office for the Mac, knowing what a delicate thread the company was hanging by and how the decision to cut off Office would have effectively killed the Mac by 1999 or so. Anybody who thinks that the guy in the turtleneck is ever going to make his products dependent on the fruits of another tech company is smoking crack – thus the Quattro acquisition, a firewall against Google’s control of AdMob, and the PA Semi acquisition, and the map company they bought a while back – hell, the Great Mentioner periodically mumbles something about Apple and search, for crying out loud. Why do you think Apple had a version of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware for six years before making it public? Because Jobs had all he wanted of being in hock to Motorola to make a faster processor, and he had a backup plan.
For better or worse, Apple now has a survivalist streak a mile wide. IL2 is full of whatever is the high-tech equivalent of 9mm ammo, dried food, flashlight batteries and water purification tablets. The Sons of the Hexachrome Fruit haven’t holed up in the compound, and probably don’t want to, but if it comes to that? They are prepared to go it alone with no Adobe, no Microsoft, no Google. And given how much time they’ve had to prepare and bank resources, I’m not sure they couldn’t pull it off. Don’t forget, the big new data center in North Carolina opens any day now…
ETA: This Android engineer breaks down how Apple’s “multitasking” will work. Long story short: it’s more or less the same technique used by Android, although Android doesn’t kill the original task after switching until real RAM is close to running out. I suspect this means faster return-from-switch on Android, at the risk of crashes if the OOM handler is overwhelmed by too many big-RAM apps and cannot free enough memory in time.