Early reviewers of Apple’s recently overhauled Macbook Air portable computer line have noticed that Apple no longer ships Adobe’s Flash runtime with the operating system preloaded on those machines.

While Apple has been quite vocal about their contempt for Adobe Flash, going so far as to completely exclude it from all mobile iOS devices, until now they have preinstalled the plugin on each new Mac, ensuring that webpages and all the content on them will “just work” in most cases.

Apple’s reason for excluding Flash on the new Macbook Air may have something to do with battery life; Flash is known to cause significant performance problems, and in prior Macbook Air models, Flash was frequently accused of being the root cause of overheating and sudden shutdown issues. Read more