... And yet Apple refused flash support on iOS. It didn't hurt Apple, and only strengthened web development by forcing new solutions to appear. Flash, once a big chunk of the web, is now a little more than a footnote.

Apple killed flash. If they will be able to kill x86 remains to be seen. I don't think web users won out because flash is dead though. Web games never recovered. Video making switched from animation to people filming themselves talking to the camera. What will we loose with x86, I wonder?

> Apple killed flash.

Apple didn’t kill Flash. Adobe did.

By failing to deliver a performant and secure version of Flash (under any architecture, but especially mobile), Adobe ensured Flash would be not be viable for the web as it evolved.

Security was indeed an issue, but I feel flash’s performance reputation was largely undeserved. Yes, it was cpu-hungry, too intense to run on the mobile hardware of the day, but that’s because it did things html5 couldn’t. You could do smooth animations and complex games in flash easily that were hard to impossible to do with regular web tech (pre-webgl). When flash died, web animation and web gaming mostly died along with it. Some of that is the engine itself, and some is the flash authoring tools, which don’t have an open web equivalent. Maybe that sort of power never belonged in a browser, but I still feel like we lost something that didn’t fully get replaced.

I still largely blame Adobe here -- they were the ones who should have been responsible for fixing Flash's performance. The complaints about it being a CPU hog weren't limited to mobile; even in the early 2000s, Mac users, at least, generally hated being forced to deal with Flash-based UIs. Adobe never seemed real concerned with optimization, I suspect precisely because of the advantages you listed, e.g., things that were hard-to-impossible to do without Flash.

At this point, at least, I'm pretty sure WebGL can do most or all of what you could do in Flash. It's possible that the tools have never caught up, but it also seems possible to me that the space that used to be occupied by Flash games has largely been filled, ironically, by mobile gaming.

They where poor stewards of the platform, to be sure. The security situation was very bad, and they did little to discourage people from using Flash for all of the wrong reasons. But you could just as easily turn around and blame Apple for the depressing state of mobile gaming.

Flash has an HTML5 equivalent. Alongside the Animate rebrand (years ago) they released HTML5 tooling that lets you export animations for the web.

> Video making switched from animation to people filming themselves talking to the camera.

Youtube was completely built around Flash, the FLV format hit a sweet spot between "not looking like trash" and "not needing more bandwidth than the average user had" that else had before. I'm pretty sure we would be seeing a shit-ton of people filming themselves talking to the camera even if Flash was still a going concern - animation is a ton of work.

> Youtube was completely built around Flash

Youtube exists because of Flash. They were are the right time and place to have a flash object sitting on a webpage that could play video in a reasonably cross platform way.

> Video making switched from animation to people

Not sure this is entirely due to the flash web player being phased out. Kids just watched their friends play from the couch, or watched more generic broadcast television. Now they still watch and play together but remotely.

Edit: 'due' not 'sure', 'play' not 'pay'

> web developers are a huge part of their brand

Are they? Maybe in HN's niche community—and it is niche—but I suspect the vast majority of Apple's customers don't remotely associate web developers with the brand.

I think it would be accurate to say web developers are a part of their market more than a part of their brand. I don't know if I'd say "huge," but I suspect a financially significant chunk of MacBook Pro sales, specifically, go to design and engineering groups in tech companies.

Using Apple computers is a part of some web developers' brands. Web developers are at best a tiny niche aspect of Apple's brand.

You don’t need docker to develop web apps.

There might not be an absolute need but the advantages of Docker are enough that, when removed, the pain is real.

> Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

They demoed Docker on stage at WWDC. They've donated equipment to Docker. Apple built a significantly better virtualization framework for Big Sur/ Apple Silicon.

What makes you think they don't care about it?

This transition is in baby steps right now. It takes time to migrate software.