New MacBook Air Doesn't Ship with Adobe Flash

Engadget revealed today that Apple's new MacBook Air doesn't ship with Adobe's Flash plug-in.

Amusingly enough, you know what's missing from the new MacBook Air models? Adobe Flash Player. While preloaded on Apple's past hardware, out of the box here it just says missing plugin, with no click to install option. To be fair, Flash doesn't come standard on a lot of machines, even for Windows, but we wonder if past models will continue to ship out with Adobe's plugin, especially once OS X 10.7 becomes de facto.

It seems Apple is continuing to distance itself from Adobe's Flash plug-in. The omission appears to be no accident with Engadget Editor Joshua Topolsky confirming with Apple that this is how the machine ships. Previous Mac OS X installations have shipped with Adobe's Flash plugin preinstalled.

Apple's dislike of the Adobe Flash plugin has been a very public debate. The controversy began when Apple first shipped the iPhone without support for Adobe's plugin. Over time, Apple has reiterated its stance against Flash in favor of HTML5 standards. Steve Jobs' open letter on Flash outlined his criticisms. While end-users are still free to install Flash on their machines, the removal of Flash as a standard component on the Mac serves to destroy the near ubiquity of Flash for the end user. This may further influence website owner's decisions to support HTML5 in addition to or instead of Flash over time.