Does Apple maintain APFS in older macOS?
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The latter seems most likely since it offers interesting user-facing features around snapshotting and integrity.
If you’re using one disk/filesystem with multiple operating systems, you are absolutely an outlier, not the general use case.
The only reason that FAT is somewhat portable is that it’s extremely simple and limited. This is also the reason why you absolutely do not want to use it for anything else than USB sticks and the likes.
Well... transferring large amount of data between at least Windows and macOS is pretty common in the media/movie/entertainment business, and add Linux to the mix if you're in a development shop.
The problem is: while ExFAT has alleviated a lot of issues on disk storage as a sort-of common enough format, there still is no cross-platform disk encryption standard. TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt is, but support is third-party and some companies refuse to use it on security grounds, so usually it's ZIP and sometimes RAR files with passwords.
Sigh.
... or designed to take advantage of today's solid state storage hardware, such as APFS claims to be doing; or at least not generate life-shortening wear-and-tear patterns.
I feel like I'm not too far off the average by only using external storage to load movies on to play on my TV.
The application registers a proper filesystem driver, so it integrates everywhere, incl. Disk Utility and other tools. So you can use it like any other filesystem. Check, format, mount, partition, etc.
Too bad we never got FAT64
For data you really care about, it's probably best to use the HFS driver for Linux or the EXT4 driver for Mac, depending on which OS you use more, and where performance is more important.
If I need to expand storage or keep a hard backup, I dedicate drives to specific machines. If I need to move files between machines, I move them over the network.
I have an external drive for a media library, storing there videos I'd like to watch and audiobooks I'd like to listen. Over years, it's grown pretty large. I'd like to have read/write access to the library from either a Macbook or a linux laptop. The linux laptop is old, and might die soon; and I am not sure whether I'll be replacing it with another linux laptop, or will switch to the Macbook entirely. I know that some people recommend getting an NAS drive; but I don't have appropriate setup for it.
Or at least be able to download drivers for the file system you need.
I think the Amiga had that ability. You could just plug in a library for the file system and read whatever disk you wanted to.
The problem isn't that they lack APIs, the problem is having someone implement the support for the desired file system format.
I used a time machine backup to load my dotfiles and other settings from my personal laptop to a new work machine.
Never, again. I was manually scripping ACL permissions from folder after folder, reinstalling Docker, all sorts of rubbish.
The current set of Mac hardware is brilliant. Once Asahi Linux has the GPU and power management configuration, I'll hopefully never use a MacOS again unless work forces me to. Certainly I'll never buy a Mac laptop again after the current supply chain issues are gone in 3-5 years.
Horrible experience as a power user.
Linux power user features have come so far. The Linux desktop is so much better than 15 years ago it brings a tear to my eye.
In fact, Apple even lists this option in their Time Machine documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784
I use time machine to backup to a Ubuntu server's ZFS share.
Time machine creates a folder for each machine [my first machine.sparsebundle], etc.
I can navigate to the "sparsebundle" directory under linux and it is not an image.
Works just fine.
Edit:
this is what is inside "mymachine.sparsebundle"
252G ./bands
35M ./mapped
252G .
What you're seeing is the raw storage for that disk image. If you copied the whole thing to a Mac (or anything that understands MacOS disk images) you could mount it then you'd see the actual files. The filesystem of that mounted image would be HFS+.
I think the issue is Time Machine much more than the underlying file system.
If you use Time Machine as a "convenience" backup instead of a critical file storage backup it does the job well. It's the fastest and simplest way to restore an exact image to a new computer, when it works.
I don't think it's wise to depend on that type of local backup for critically important files in the first place when you've got free or trivially expensive higher reliability and durability services available (things like S3 and B2 or even just plain old consumer cloud storage that is professionally managed).
E.g., my free tier Dropbox that I've kept miscellaneous important documents on for over a decade has never lost a thing, and it also stores the folder locally for an automatic second/third location on each of my systems. It's really brainless and consumer-friendly with reliability that I'd call "good enough for the layperson."
I can't say the same thing about any of the local hardware I've put backups on, regardless of whether it was Time Machine or some other backup method.
I agree, the problems with Time Machine are greater than the underlying file system. But the underlying file system was problematic enough on its own for me to never want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
Anyway, the real test would have been to take an APFS drive from Ventura and test it on High Sierra and see if there are any issues. I’m guessing that APFS was written with forward compatibility in mind. If a new version writes some additional bits that the old one doesn’t know how to take advantage of, I would hope it silently ignores them without affecting any basic functionality.
This article uses a lot of words to talk about writing version numbers without any thoughtful analysis on what those versus numbers might even do.
This was an insane engineering feat. Oh to be a fly in the room when the go ahead decision was made. And the stories from teams who tracked the rollout.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how did you conclude that? Not from the marketing ("And one more thing; we're not going to support this long-term!" — to rapturous applause), not from their specs, website, release notes, or anything like that.
No, my guess is you read between the lines that Apple is a disposable-consumer-product company. Of course they'd never admit this, and _that's_ the problem here.
It is not unreasonable to expect long-term support for software, and brushing that under the carpet with "ah well, you know what Apple's like", just gives them license to never have to _admit_ what they are.
Evidence from version numbers of APFS, a critical sub-system in macOS, is entirely consistent with Apple’s claimed support policy, of only fully maintaining the current version of macOS, and only providing security updates to superseded macOS for two years after that.
I know this, so I update immediately, and get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality.
> It is not unreasonable to expect long-term support for software
It is unreasonable to expect that, if that is not what has ever been promised to you or delivered in practice.
And you never will. Part of my point was that they want all the benefits of saying they're not going to provide long-term support, with none of the downsides of saying it. Hence you _know_ this to be true, but can't find it written down.
> I know this, so I update immediately, and get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality.
"My boss treats me like badly / my internet service is poor / none of the software I paid for works two years from now / [any other endless examples of being treated like a shmuck]. I know this, and just get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality"
> It is unreasonable to expect that, if that is not what has ever been promised to you or delivered in practice.
I don't need to be explicitly promised reasonable terms to find the way I'm being treated unreasonable. "Well, we never _said_ it would still work in a few years" is not going to cut it.
People, we used to have standards. Some of you are too young to remember — and I do _not_ mean to sound condescending, it's just true that some of you weren't around back then — but people had expectations of products, and they were high (in comparison to today). You bought things for life. We've been frog-boiled through iterations by companies like Apple to accept throwaway culture.
"It's just the Apple way" has been used to defend just about everything at this point.
Unclear support terms and unsupported software for machines that were sold brand new at retail just a couple of years ago at premium prices is just plain wrong.
EDIT: I've changed "a few months" to "a couple of years" as I can't find the link that explains which of the languished SKUs was still being sold on the Apple.com site as new shortly before being axed in Ventura. It also doesn't include refurb Macs or those that are still in retail channels which would make the support life even shorter from new.
This is a far cry from Windows 10 to Windows 11, where blocking old machines (while still allowing a workaround) due to genuine security enhancements was met with uproar. Thankfully no T2 Macs have been dropped yet but I suspect despite having great hardware and being perfectly capable (and supporting enclave security and encryption hardware), they'll be axed unceremoniously in a couple of years anyway.
When I do software for macOS I know that the culture is I don't have to test on 10 old versions that people might be running. It's reasonable in macOS to just say 'you obviously have to be running the latest version' which simplifies so much, and allows me to get on with more of what matters.
Lol so what is the problem? Why would you bin it?
Apple's offer after two years is a lot less than the quarter of the retail price that was mentioned by parent and will probably be much worse still by the time they deprecate them. Just not as attractive an option as parent made it seem, at least for me if I wanted to get rid of it.
When people "why is this still a thing?" sometimes it sounds like they're asking "why do I have to make trade-offs at all?" which really doesn't make any sense.
It is interesting to look at what changes between releases, which is why blog posts like this get attention but it’s not a problem report - notice how there isn’t anyone saying something like “I took an external drive and it didn’t work on my 2013 Mac?”
Sure enough, every time we cut off an old device or OS, we'd get customers complaining and giving bad reviews. But then, Mr. Apple Culture guy would look at the dashboard and say "See? Nobody is using that version anymore!" No shit, it's because we cut it off and those users bailed on us, genius.
Backwards compatibility is one of the greatest services you can give to your customer. Cutting off support for old versions simply because you're too lazy to maintain that support is just telling those customers to fuck off and find a competitor. The code simplifications/savings that you get from dropping old versions are seldom worth that. They often amount to one or two more lines with an if() statement.
You can see this in the lack of any functionality for such a simple task as window tiling.
Power users should decamp, rapidly, to Vivaldi + Linux Distro.
Window tiling on fully DEs on linux are not very good. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinammon don't have very good window tiling, either. They're very basic and tend to mimic Windows. The automatic tiling WMs lack even very basic functionality, like a login manager, a status bar, a clock, or volume controls, so I don't see how that's acceptable when compared to MacOS.
It also has more complete and consistent keyboard shortcuts than most of the alternatives since that’s been part of the HIG for decades.
Similarly, I do most of my window management using the keyboard so I’m skeptical that you’ve done enough research to speak so authoritatively, or considered that possibly power users might have more than a relatively minor feature factoring in to such a big decision.
There are extremely tiny pockets of brilliant engineering (seamless Rosetta on M1/M2 Macs), but the rest of the company seems to be fully devoid of even competent developers.
And maintaining software? Get out of here.
[1] In Gruber's post-WWDC talk show
> After Federighi claimed that they needed ...
That's seems like Jobs's legacy holding it wrong done wrong. This is the guy claimed Stage Manager *needs* M1...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/13/craig-federighi-stage-m...
Which ended up getting with the exact same quirks to older models.
So I'd loose faith on this guy marketing hypes rather than demote all Apple's team with talented people like Johny Srouji.
There was a time in the mid aughts where Apple software was some of the most well built, most reliable software in existence. Those days are long gone.
Part of me blames the yearly release cycle. Rather than a rock solid OS every couple years, we get incremental junk where they haven’t had the time to refine anything, just rushing to meet the impending yearly deadlines.
1. Find a thousand people who are capable of doing this job
2. Find a thousand people who want to do this job
3. Spend $300,000/year total keeping each of them employed ($3 billion)
- Stop mandated yearly releases
- Stop mandated "release must have new features or else"
- Stop superfluous changes that take away time and focus. Examples: all the recent redesigns (attempt to butcher Safari, and System Preferences being the biggest ones)
Boom. You have enough people to focus on improving things instead of always scrambling to meet deadlines with random changes.
Early OS X was a mess. Doing basic tasks like resizing a window was laggy and slow. There were most definitely bugs and issues.
What evidence do we have that today's corporate-employed developers are less competent than before?
You're blaming annual releases but Puma, Jaguar, and Panther were all a released year apart.
My take on it would be that the early OS iterations were more impactful and exciting, but now macOS is mature and "complete," so of course all the additions are going to be convenience and consumer features rather than things that make the core OS better.
> Early OS X was a mess.
The OS was steadily and visibly improving. However, once it reached maturity, Apple decided to throw all care (and its own HIGs) out of the window. And now the OS has moved from stagnation to steady degradation.
https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-custo...
The truth is, HIG is a guideline. That’s the G. It’s a living document that changes, like language.
A lot of changes that happened to macOS and Apple software looked bad at first release, like Final Cut Pro X. Many of those decisions were the right move in the long term.
Don't mistake early iteration deficiencies of rewritten component with an overall trend of degradation (again, see Final Cut Pro).
If you’re a late majority adopter or laggard, you might just not be comfortable with change at first or ever, and that’s perfectly okay.
And sure, not all change is good, but bad software doesn’t make Apple money, either.
What are the current changes except "we don't understand how desktop OSes work, and we've only worked with iOS, so there"?
I'm absolutely, entirely sure, Apple puts every single one of them to work on the Apple Watch/iPhone.
Not a single member of the "A team" will be working on MacOS.
Apple Watch is the moneymaker.
I mean: why would Apple write two separate Messages apps when their two types of devices run the same processor and share many elements of the same OS architecture?
Also, what is wrong with the current Messages app?
I think you're extrapolating a lot of early experiences with Catalyst apps because it used to be less polished and finished. I haven't experienced any issues with the Messages app in Ventura. If I was an end user with no tech experience I wouldn't have been able to tell you that the app was switched over to the Catalyst-based version, it looks and functions the same to me and now it behaves more consistently with the version that sits on my phone, which delivered value to me.
Meanwhile the richest company in the world apparently needs to spend two years re-writing the extremely basic app they have in Catalyst that only needs to run on two platforms. And still have one tenth of the features. And still not be able to sync mobile and desktop version for things like "delete conversation".
An investigation that would be more interesting, I think, than this version number probing would be testing what happens if you plug drives from systems with new APFS versions into systems with old APFS versions. Do the old systems take the drives into read-only mode? Is there some flag on the filesystem that indicates a minimum version that may write to the drive, which might make an older system mount the newer formatted drives read-only?
That's not how I use Mac OS generally, but I could see it coming up in my house. My wife is happily using a 2015-ish MBP, which won't get Ventura and probably won't be upgraded for a couple of years given the light usage it sees. It's entirely possible (if somewhat unlikely) that I could find myself wanting to plug in a drive formatted by a newer Mac.
I think it’s more likely that the newer drivers fix bugs in the drivers, make them support newer disk controller hardware, speed them up, or make them more reliable than that they change the on-disk format.
Having said that, the reference (https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-Sys...) lists quite a few on-disk fields that store a version number. There may be bug fixes that necessitated changes to the on-disk format.
On Sunday the author also blew some anti-vax dogwhistles in that same article.
> It’s a similar argument to that concerning vaccination of younger people against Covid or other generally non-fatal conditions. Most people under the age of 70 who are in reasonably good health should be safe from serious or prolonged illness or death.
I'm not sure why the author threw in that nonsense in the last article but I'm calling it out once again because I think people need to be accountable for tossing around FUD and misinformation around subjects that have factual truths. The scientifically verified truth is that people of all ages benefit from getting the Covid-19 vaccine and boosters when it comes to Covid-19 outcomes, which don't just include the possibility of death but also include lingering or permanent negative affects.
Back to the subject at hand, I don't understand the point of this exercise. Apple never claimed to maintain "critical subsystems" in previous OS versions, and I think the author of the article is using the "critical" verbiage to make it sound like a problem that Apple isn't maintaining APFS in previous versions of macOS.
Is Microsoft maintaining NTFS in Windows 10?
> But the only way to tell whether you are most people is in retrospect.
Meaning that one should take the necessary precautions, i.e. get the vaccine.