Networking changes coming in macOS 27
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule
I think there's some population of folks that have been doing NAS TM backups over AFP, and they'll now have to switch to SMB.
Every OS update I try mounting with no ticket, get a panic, fill in the error reporting dialog with a nice “hope you had a nice holiday break!” message or whatever is seasonally appropriate, with the same simple steps to reproduce. It’s just kinda comical at this point.
My guess is kerberized NFS has absolutely zero users within Apple, and it’s likely hard to find an engineer there who even knows what Kerberos is anymore.
I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.
...the last version of Server shipped in 2021 (and the last real version shipped almost a decade before that).
In fact that’s probably the clue… everyone internally at Apple using krb5 auth with nfs is probably using the internal SSO software and the code path for “vanilla” Kerberos (ie. Ticket Viewer.app and so on) has zero testing. Maybe I’ll write that into the next crash tracer report I type up :-D
And yes, Im sure theres a very lonely radar bug for this. But even MM of revenue wont fix “edge cases” like this.
Small world!
I filed a radar while working there on a bug that was introduced in 2009 and it's still not fixed because it was low in the stack and the person responsible for it said they didn't think it was wise to make changes that late in the beta cycle (it was close to the annual release). It's never been fixed. I stopped checking major releases about five or six years ago.
* https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.8.0.html ("vfs_fruit")
* https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...
I don't recall when I stopped running netatalk on my NAS and switched to pure Samba, but I think it was before 2018.
Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.
Time really does fly.
philosophically I would beg to differ about any premise assuming we can trust the castle and moat model. Even on home networks.
1. When I benchmarked it, AFP was significantly faster than SMB. Both with SMB2 and SMB3. Even when transport encryption was turned off.
2. On SMB2+, symlinks created by the client are not real symlinks. They're "Minshall+French" links which only look like symlinks to other SMB2+ clients. To the server and NFS mounts they look like flat files with the target path encoded in them.
3. It exposes a different precision for certain timestamps. Software that uses this metadata to decide whether a file needs to be updated will see almost every file as needing a resync.
It's been a year or two since I checked the status of these. The situation may have improved since last I looked.
They never supported it properly in the first place and then it just meh'ed out of existence.
I hope "the new Apple" is going to take software seriously.
The upside is that it's dead simple when it comes to how the backup is stored. In 10 years time, having files in a filesystem will still work, but I imagine restoring an old time machine backup will require quite a bit of work
If you wanted to you could probably figure out how to do apfs snapshots before rsyncing
If you exclude pointless stuff like browser caches it's also pretty performant compared to timecapsule, and the transfer is properly encrypted
A backup of my 2TB MacBook literally takes weeks.
For the "sparsebundles break" issue:
* Back up to multiple targets. I use both mbentley's Time Machine Docker image (only one backup per source machine) and UnRAID's built-in Time Machine functionality (multiple backups of same machine allowed).
* Use spaceinvader1's macinabox Docker image to have a local way to `fsck_apfs` the above sparsebundles.
* When one irreparably breaks, delete it and replace it with a copy of a working one from another of the above targets.
For the "backups are incredibly slow" issue:
* One of the above targets is to an SSD.
* Use TheTimeMachineMechanic's "Speed" option after a backup to determine the slow spots. Look at patterns in "Current:" lines. Pumping the output to an LLM is very helpful here.
My old trusty readynas should still work i think.. probalby. Supports smd for time machine and smb3 generally. If it doesn't I might finally be pushed onto a nas that isn't discontinued.
It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.
I still am sore from when I "upgraded" macOS and suddenly support for my 1080i TV was gone. Yesterday it worked fine, today it's gone. All because they can't be bothered to maintain a code path.
With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.
With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.
These arguments fall apart when you remember that Apple has several trillion dollars at hand. It's not some shoestring startup.
IIRC, that could exist for MacOS in the form of Darwin.
With that said, kernel maintainers have recently indicated that some unused subsystems are likely to be removed soon, as AI is now finding (real) security vulnerabilities in them that nobody is willing to fix.
Looking through Apple’s financial statements, they theoretically could support these old systems. I’m not saying a cut doesn’t make sense, but just that economics-wise they could keep one guy for it
And that increasingly gets difficult to do. i386 support went down the drain in the kernel in 2012, i486 is probably going down the drain as well this year [1] and soon-ish another bunch of really really old stuff will go as well because it isn't maintained [2] - good luck finding someone still running IPX networks or ISDN hardware.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/06/patch_to_end_i486_sup...
I am unsure if linux support has any bearing on it, though.
Because I noticed my old Core 2 Quad PC with Nvidia 8600GT that my parents use as their email and Facebook machine, doesn't boot with any linux newer than Kernel 6.1 even though I can get Windows 11 to boot on it.
So the myth around "Linux is great for old PCs", highly depends on what HW you have.
There's no fixes that I could find. My LLM research says nouveau dropped support for that Nvidia architecture on newer kernels. Bummer.
You can still use an older 6.x kernel, but yeah... It's had almost a 20yr run! 2007 release.
But by modifying it right? Because the core 2 does not support SSE4.2
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
Bus mouse support isn't removed because it's old but because it's been broken since 2015 and nobody noticed.
I actually wouldn't expect macOS to support actual floppy drives since the OS's list of supported devices doesn't include any that shipped with floppy drives. The fact that I cannot install the latest macOS on any devices older than 2019 is a related, but separate problem.
This is very different from legacy PC floppy drive controllers which spoke a completely different protocol, which was very complex and full of footguns
Legacy floppy controllers also had various legacy features almost nobody used, like soft deletion of sectors (IBM added this in the 70s for use with primitive database systems), or attaching tape drives using the floppy interface (nowadays if you buy a brand new tape drive, the interface options are SAS or Fibre Channel)
I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.
I disagree. They are dropping support because nobody is maintaining them. There may very well be people still using these features, but they haven't been motivated or aren't properly skilled to offer to maintain them going forward, and haven't motivated some other skilled person via payments.
Rather, the core difference is that Apple does not offer a way to have external people take over providing support.
Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.
> There are still some people who need to run 32-bit applications that cannot be updated; the solution he has been pushing people toward is to run a 32-bit user space on a 64-bit kernel. This is a good solution for memory-constrained systems; switching to 32-bit halves the memory usage of the system. Since, on most systems, almost all memory is used by user space, running a 64-bit kernel has a relatively small cost. Please, he asked, do not run 32-bit kernels on 64-bit processors.
Supporting old hardware and software has a substantial cost that only grows exponentially. Companies exist to print money, not to cater to the smallest niches.
It would be great if they could support things, but I most definitely understand why they don't.
Fun fact: Yes! Basically all still do, because TPM chips are connected to the CPU via ISA.
See for example: https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/isa-over-tpm-to-your-pc/
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
I have colleagues who are running AFP on BSD for continuous backups on their systems, and they have to reconfigure something new to be able to continue backing up their systems.
Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.
Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.
Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.
Relevant to the discussion is that the project comes with an AFP client as well. I have no experience with the client but I've used the Netatalk server for more than 15 years.
This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.
Seriously, no-one should still be using 1.1 since ... 5 years ago? It's not even the 1.2 -> 1.3 previous upgrade problems we're talking about.
(Yes, this article is about an extension of the deadline. I don't remember what happened after that.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026192
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...
This is nothing like the mDNS stuff.
> Networking changes coming in macOS 27
And yet:
> This year, with just over six weeks to go before that first beta of macOS 27, we already have two warnings of what might be coming.
> It repeated those warnings with macOS Sequoia 15.5, but still hasn’t confirmed when AFP will be lost.
> Although Apple carefully avoids being too specific, it warns that this change could come “as early as the next major software release”,
It seems like somehow got overwritten to the original title of the post.
Nevertheless, knowing Apple so far, unless _some_ large-enterprise~y customer comes and objects, they will drop the support. We already know Intel support is dropping. Why not clean up rest of the things from the kernel and the userspace?
The facts: Apple put a warning in macOS 15.5 that AFP support might be dropped in the future.
The claim: AFP support will be dropped in macOS 27.
I just do not see how you get from the facts to the claim. This is just complete speculation.
…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?
That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:
defaults read com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.
Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.
The Finder is really an horrible piece of sh*t of software, slow as hell, doesn't provide the most basic information[1], and, of course, doesn't work properly when browsing network shares either SMB or NFS.
[1]virtually all common file browsers (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE dolphin) displays at all times : the number of files in the current folder, their size, the number of files selected, their size; also all but the Finder have a "recent files" section that actually contains the latest files used, while the Finder displays a completely random selection of recent files, but never the most recently used ones.
I just hope they won't break anything they don't need to break (which is more concerning usually) and that they won't drop other things that do make sense to keep until transitioned properly (eg. OpenGL as one example)
AFP and Time Capsules add attack vectors to the OS, which can be targeted even when few users actively using them. One dev could keep both basically functional, but to what end? User counts are already small, and people that aren't using them are still exposed by their mere existence.
Shrinking or removing code, in my experience, is one of the biggest single wins you can have in software development. Less to test, less to update, less to secure.
cf Linux removing old network drivers this week for the same reason (without the hand-wringing that this Apple announcement is getting!)
Apple's source is not public, but the protocol is still fully documented if someone wanted to create a new client and server. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
However, they'd be better off just creating a driver and server around the open source Netatalk implementation.
Development is a finite resource, the argument here is to allocate them to hard-to-secure, outmoded, replaced, technology instead of anything future relevant. It doesn't make sense.
I have no doubt the bean counters have drawn up every kind of spreadsheet they can imagine trying to quantify it as being not worth it, but I don't think these kinds of quality of life things can be easily quantified, because each small thing maintained might only impact a small number of users but collectively, all of these kinds of small things add up to either a system with sharp corners that constantly papercuts the user (current Apple software), or one that is so seamless that it engenders customer loyalty for decades (old Apple software). This kind of shortsighted penny-pinching is how companies become a shell of their former selves, suffering a slow death-by-MBA.
If Apple is known for anything, it's that they keep moving ahead with the operating system, even if it means leaving some users behind… and that goes back to the late 80's/early 90s when apps had to be "32-bit clean" [1] to run on System 7 and newer Motorola 68000 processors like the 68020, 68030, etc.
Some beloved apps don't make the transition, and that happens with every technology transition like 68000 to PowerPC, then to Intel, and then to ARM. And of course, from Classic Mac OS to OS X, Mac OS X then macOS.
I've been active in user groups since the Apple II days; there's a cohort who mostly won't upgrade their hardware but complain bitterly that they lack certain features. Or they attempt these fragile and unreliable hacks to keep their old hardware and software running.
Usually, they're doing themselves more harm than good, especially if they're not technical.
Also, it's pretty unlikely recent college graduates would be able to tackle old C++ or Objective-C code written before they were born, in some cases, to keep something like AFP alive. Regardless of Apple’s financial success, it's not a good use of resources to keep a bespoke network protocol going that originated in 1985 that less than 1% of the installed base is actively using.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS_memory_manageme...
This hypothetical employee would:
- update the TimeCapsule firmware from using AFP to using a brand new SMBv3 implementation, including both porting and making it "fit" within the constraints of 2013 hardware.
- be designing and implementing a migration system for both the TimeCapsule and the Mac to move to using the new implementation
- be responsible for all security analysis, QA, and documentation for the firmware and migration system
They also need to get it done by the first macOS version that has AFP removed, which will land in developer preview in six weeks and need to be feature complete in about 17 weeks.
If Apple hires a new developer capable of doing that, I don't want them to relegate them to supporting 13 year old hardware. I want them improving things that the majority of users actually need.
And that is the core problem with this sort of argument. Even with infinite money or the infinite possibilities of open source contributions, the availability of talent is still _always_ finite.
I mean, it's basically just like a time machine backup plus, uh, a little bit of some older files that I don't want to keep on my main Mac.
seems like any NAS would take way more space than I would love to. I suppose one alternative would be actually getting some kind of like Beelink PC and then maybe setting up a proper home server, moving some of my side projects in there, running plex from it. The problem is that the current ram prices, it's a surprisingly expensive solution.
You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.
Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to re-enable AFP [2].
The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).
However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.
If you know it's unrelated, why try to derail this discussion? Why not start another? What's the point?
Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs, instead of being judged on its own merits?
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
How is this a criticism? Seems smart to me.
Enshittification. When you're an ecosystem monopoly, people are forced to buy your shit no matter how bad it gets.
I would (grudgingly) accept this argument for iOS, but for Mac OS it doesn't make any sense.
You didn't read what I said. I said MacOS IS a monopoly in the Apple ecosystem.
Apple users dissatisfied with how MacOS is changing, as the one I was replying to, have nothing else to switch to without uprooting themselves out of the Apple ecosystem altogether, which most don't do but just put up with it.
iCloud? You can use Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever MS calls theirs. Apple Music? Pretty sure it plays at both.
Most major apps are cross platform (Adobe, Microsoft and such), or Electron based.
Syncing with your iPhone? You can do that from Windows and Linux as well. Airpods? Work with Android and Windows too.
And so on.
I mean Average Joes off the street, who can't find Ukraine on the map, not HN users of Macs with a SaaS side hustle.
> I mean Average Joes off the street, who can't find Ukraine on the map
How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map? This metric means nothing.
With this bad faith line of reasoning that ignores user defaults, ecosystem ties and switching friction, Windows was also never a monopoly because companies and users could just switch to Mac or Linux whenever they wanted.
>How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map?
Since when is Missouri a country?
This bad faith line of reasoning ignores how viable Mac or Linux actually were as consumer devices at the time Microsoft had a monopoly.
Their country doesn't make decisions about American on their behalf (or even at all), so they don't have a moral obligation as citizens to. And Iowa and Missouri are mere states, and not even very interesting ones at that.
Being able to point something out on a map is a metric that means nothing. That is my point.
Now, Apple's incentives are changed. The App Store alone makes multiple times more money in a year than the sum of annual Mac and iPad sales put together. The OSes for these products are decidedly back-burner so Apple can focus on expanding AppleTV's IP library and lobby for Apple Pay. Ternus won't be your savior.
John Ternus says Apple has ‘so much’ opportunity to expand services
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
I got Samba 4 working on Apple Time Capsules: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.
- Very slow, even on an M4.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
I've been paying for iCloud storage since I don't know when.
It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.
So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.
It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
I've loopback mounted disk images over network filesystems for many years without any recurring issues outside of macOS. It's not rocket science, particularly if you have a reliable network connection.
I'm aware there's a long tail of possible issues that can come up, but most of the complaints I've seen amount to "I have a reliable connection and Time Machine is still a tire fire", which suggests that the problem exists outside of that particular set of edge cases.
(It seems to genuinely be that nobody at Apple really cares about network filesystems at this point - people in this thread talking up AFP makes me want to look at migrating _to_ using it for my mac's backups, because SMB on macOS randomly drops or hangs for no reason and Time Machine at least twice has just started stating the backup was completely unreadable, leading to me having to restore the backup filesystem from backups.
And attempting to use NFS on macOS somehow makes everything three times as buggy, like they special cased SMB shares to not be touched in some random "touch everything synchronously" calls throughout the OS but didn't do it with NFS shares, so Finder will now take seconds or minutes to do things that shouldn't involve that share, but as soon as you remove it, it stops doing so.)
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
- BigCo already is a zero-sum deal, they use Xcode-cloud as a service, which runs back on their servers anyway... (Google, Amazon, Azure, etc)
- It was not a long-standing product. Introduced somewhere around 2016~ish if I remember correctly. Only lasted a few major releases. Easier to kill than an established one (ie. TimeMachine)
They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.
The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
As for IronWolf Pro drives, I chose them because they seem to have similar longevity to enterprise drives with less noise (my equipment is in a closet under the stairs).
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.