Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

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Apple usually isn't the first one to get a tech demonstrator out or the first to integrate the latest and greatest CPUs / panels / etc, but they are often the first to get a new feature in front of a large number of consumers with viable polish as a default option. This kind of news often fails to propagate out of the apple bubble.

Random example: filesystem journaling so that you don't have to wait minutes to hours for fsck every time your computer hard resets. It showed up in Windows first -- but only in Windows Server. It was very intentionally excluded from consumer Windows. Then it showed up in Mac OS X. For a decade, hard restarts were painful on Windows and smooth on Mac. Finally, in Windows 8, just in time for SSDs to make it moot, it showed up in consumer Windows.

This story repeats over and over. Cameras and video chat out-of-the-box, backlit keyboards, desktop search, retained and GPU composited GUIs, Webkit, and so on. Apple wasn't first, but they were the first to do it well and get it in front of lots of people. People complain about apple users being sheep inside a bubble, but it goes both ways.

I'd answer your question more specifically, but I'm currently on the wrong side of the bubble in Android land. When I buy my next phone, I'll do my research, which will include swinging by an apple store to experience qualitative things like stylus/AR latency first-hand. You should too :)

re: filesystem journaling: Unless you were one of those crazy people that used fat32 in spite of Microsoft's defaults, filesystem journaling has been the default in Windows mainstream consumer OSes since the release of Windows XP using NTFS, which was journalled since day 1. (I am not counting Windows 2000 and before since they were not the default for consumer boxes).

Then why did Windows take hours to fsck after a hard reset until Windows 8? That's the actual problem, even though I admittedly might have made a mistake in attributing it to a lack of journaling.

I was using Windows on a daily basis across multiple computers and this wasn't a subtle thing. In fact, I still regularly use Windows 7 (oscilloscope, can't update) and occasionally get "reminded" about this, even though I also remember a number of gnarly examples from my everyday computer use.

Most people just skipped it, and I did too, until one time it got into a state where no programs would run...

As sibling commenter wrote, journaled NTFS was part of the Windows XP, which was released before first release of OSX (10.0).

Not only that, journaled HFS+ was introduced in OSX 10.2, not in 10.0. It was enabled by default in 10.3. Way later than NTFS.

However, there's a reason for all that, and why Windows 9X used FAT filesystem: it was much faster. Computers in '90s didn't have any spare perfomance, and journaling was not needed by most users. It was introduced into consumer releases only when they were fast enough for users not no notice.

So... I'll repeat what I said to sibling: why did Windows take minutes to hours to fsck after a hard reset when Mac OS didn't between 2003 and 2012 (Windows 8)?

I'm even being generous by using past tense here because I still have to live with Win 7 and this particular problem (no, I can't just upgrade, it's a $40k industrial tool). I'd be ecstatic to learn that the ungodly slow fscks are redundant or easily disabled and the whole thing is just a matter of extremely poor defaults.

If windows took hours to chkdsk (that's the term used under Windows, not fsck), it means it was (is?) something seriously wrong with your hardware and/or filesystem.

Normally, it took few minutes. The only way to avoid slow chkdsks in the future is to fix the underlying issue.

Also note that I'm not telling you to upgrade. I know that it is impossible with systems that have lab equipment attached. If you want support from the vendor, that is. So the question is, why don't you ask the vendor for support? This is in their scope.

Also, it was very easy to have damaged HFS+ and not know about it. There was a thriving market of third party utilities (Disk Warrior & co) that would gladly tell you and fix it, but most users didn't use them.

The oscilloscope doesn't take hours to chkdisk, it takes ~5 minutes, which is bad but completely typical of my other experiences with Windows 7, so what should I expect the vendor to do about it? Other than try to sell me a new one that runs Windows 10 for another $40k, I mean? :]

The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way.

Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults.

In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.

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