“APFS is the Apple File System. It was introduced at WWDC 2016 and, starting this year, it will replace the existing file system, HFS+, on Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, and Mac Pro,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore. “Apple made a developer preview available for macOS Sierra back at WWDC and, with iOS 10.3 beta, Apple’s made APFS available for testing on iPhone as well.”
“Many people don’t need to know much about Apple File System,” Ritchie writes. “It’s an implementation detail that will be largely transparent to end-users when it rolls out. Any future features it enables, like smarter backups and faster updates, and things we haven’t even thought about yet, will no doubt get market all on their own anyway. For them, APFS will likewise be an implementation detail.”
Ritchie writes, “For anyone interested in file systems, though, there’s a lot in APFS to find interesting.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s very encouraging to see the pace with which Apple is moving on APFS. Moving to a modern, unified file system across all devices will help Apple move faster, with fewer errors. A replacement for HFS+ is long overdue!
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s iOS 10.3: A very, very important upgrade – January 25, 2017
APFS: What Apple’s new Apple File System means to you – June 24, 2016
APFS: New Apple File System promises more speed, flexibility, reliability – June 17, 2016
The feds’ll hate this: Apple’s new APFS file system ‘engineered with encryption as a primary feature’ – June 14, 2016
Buh-bye HFS+, hello APFS (Apple File System) for macOS! – June 14, 2016
Apple can do better than Sun’s ZFS – October 26, 2009
Apple discontinues ZFS project, turns attention to own next-gen file system – October 24, 2009
Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server’s ZFS goes MIA – June 9, 2009
I recall that ZFS did/does some neat tricks with data that made RAID automatic (I think) and allowed multiple disk volumes to essentially be merged and unmerged seamlessly? Does APFS do this?
The latter concept would seemingly allow your iPhone’s data to be completely available to your laptop and vice versa while they are close to each other, and then have them disconnect just as easily. Also would it allow the stacking of computing power, so that your phone could supplement the laptop and vice versa?
Apple was playing with ZFS well over 10 years ago and even shipped a beta file system based upon ZFS at one point only to drop it for no publicly disclosed reason.
ZFS has some error correction capabilities in it that, when utilized with multiple disks (HDD or SSD), is redundant to some of the RAID implementations redundant (and certain combinations of the two were actually slower than either implemented alone). However, ZFS is not automatically a software RAID.
So far I have seen nothing in APFS that is a significant advantage of APFS over ZFS, but I’m taking an optimistic wait and see attitude at the moment.
Appreciate the reply!
HFS+ has been around since 1998 — almost thirty years ago
Not quiiiiiite 30….
ALMOST
19 is not almost 30…
Sorry PC, you need to be re-edjamacated.
Yeah, it’s almost 20. That’s still ages in technology years. We’ve made a lot of technological progress in the last 100 years or so. From magnetic tape to hard drives, and finally to Solid State Drives. APFS is the file system we’ve been needing for our Solid State Drives.
It’s new math. 😀
it’s the alternative math
While many here will understand the technical implications and possibilities better than me the way it is implemented across all devices consistently must surely help develop unifying concepts that either don’t exist today or are at best a little clunky or un-user friendly. May one also hope that in so doing some of the apparent hold ups/delays in product releases may be at least in part explained, though that may be wishful thinking on my part. Either way lets hope that cohesion between the OS variations becomes more something we barely think of in time.
I think what you’re suggesting is that APFS is just now putting a toe into the water and that might be why there’s been no big splash in the last year or so, with respect to hardware. I don’t think that’s the case. Apple does want to get this thing out into the wild for development’s sake but it has little bearing on the physical designs and software components that drive sales. In other words, it isn’t an excuse for Apple’s moribund product strategy.
Earlier this week, I tried arguing that Apple’s pipeline was stopped up because of Intel’s recalcitrance or ineptitude. That argument failed; almost everyone ascribed Apple’s problems refreshing the product line to Apple, specifically to Tim Cook.
Fundamentally, what this means is that faulty human perception is trying—hard—to drive reality to a wished-for state, with the current guy in charge being the scapegoat. In the long run this has never worked because the next guy is just another flawed human.
I hope they retrofit their TimeCapsules to use it. Mine is kind of unreliable. It regularly requires a new backup to be made and it’s only a year old.