“An Apple official on Monday said Sun Microsystems’ open-source file system would not be in the next version of the Mac operating system, contradicting statements made last week by Sun’s chief executive,” Antone Gonsalves reports for InformationWeek.
“During an interview with InformationWeek, Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS, said, ‘ZFS is not happening,’ when asked whether Sun’s Zettabyte File System would be in Leopard. Instead, Leopard would use Apple’s current hierarchical file system, called HFS+. The Apple file system was first introduced in 1998 in Mac OS 8.0,” Gonsalves reports.
“Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard,” Gonsalves reports. “A representative with Sun did not have any immediate comment.”
Full article here.
[UPDATE: 11:39pm EDT: Apple: Mac OS X Leopard will use ZFS – June 12, 2007]
SUN is stupid to make such bold claims. Why don’t they wait to find out if Leopard will truly have it or not.
D’oh!
I was really hoping ZFS would be there. Oh well…
I’m glad. ZFS is kinda silly anyway.
DAMN.
Adding ZFS to Mac OS X would have been fantastic. It would have made Vista look just that much more antiquated than it already is.
Bummer.
We are moving all of our site designs to an informational flow rather than the staid hierarchical approach. I was really hoping that Apple would do the same since an informational navigation-flow is a much easier to comprehend user interface.
Just goes to show that Sun, and Schwartz in particular, was totally full of sh*t…
According to what I read, ZFS is pretty awesome and it should be a future part of Mac OS X.
Of course there is problems licensing something like this later on after it’s implemented. Apple is quite qualified to make their own.
What I feel has happened was that Apple was there to take a closer peak, toying with them about using it, but in the meanwhile deciding how to make their own better version in house.
Now Schwartz could have been trying to force Apple’s hand, call their bluff or putting Apple on patent lawsuit notice.
Perhaps Apple really is going to use it, but not right away. Later versions of Leopard perhaps?
Perhaps Schwartz was just trying to get some free publicity for the format?
zfs=zune for some – but not Leopard.
people were silly to get their hopes up, this file system is not ready for the mainstream, sun don’t even use it as boot drive, it needs to mature, but it is nice to know apple are aware of its potential
Some people have commented that there are too many difficult issues with ZFS for Apple to jump on it so quickly. Apple is definitely working on ZFS and may well include it in the next version of OS X — or is it OS XI. On a server, it would be awesome.
Still, I am disappointed. But then Apple never claimed they would suppot ZFS.
There’s already screen shots out there that show ZFS as a formatting option in the leopard builds. So it’s clearly supported.
Bob is seriously mistaken about ZFS not being ready for mainstream… There are a LOT of companies using it for production systems. Being a boot partition or not doesn’t really enter into it. The benefit of ZFS isn’t really related to booting a system it has to do with binding together large numbers of cheap disks with little effort.
Perhaps apple wont feature it, but they’d be foolish to pull it out.
Apple simply isn’t going to implement ZFS until they solve the boot problem. That’s just the way they operate. Once they have a complete solution to take advantage of the technology, then they’ll put it to use. Apple just isn’t in the habit of half-assed features.
When you’re dealing with people who are making public statements, they sometimes choose their words very carefully.
Statement #1 “Leopard would use Apple’s current hierarchical file system, called HFS+”
Statement #2 “Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard”
On the face of it, you could be forgiven for thinking that ZFS is dead in the water for now as far as Apple is concerned and that only HFS+ is to be used in the near future.
But these two statements are not mutually exclusive. Leopard will clearly use HFS+, Apple has never said that ZFS is going to be a part of Leopard. But there’s nothing to say that Leopard couldn’t use both HFS+ ~and~ ZFS and there’s nothing to say that ~only~ HFS+ will be used in Leopard.
For instance, there are known difficulties with ZFS and booting from it, but it might be desirable to use HFS+ on an internal drive within a Mac, but to use a system like ZFS on a networked drive, such as one plugged into an AirPort Base Station. This certainly could fit well with some of the plans that Apple have recently announced.
I’ve no idea whether this is at all likely, technically possible, or even desirable, but doing so would still reconcile those two apparently conflicting statements.
Folks… ZFS is already in leopard… it’s publicly visible:
http://www.mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopard/
It doesn’t matter if you can boot off it or not. It it super useful for anyone who needs large amounts of redundant storage.
Sure they might rip it out… but that would seem rather pointless. Leave it in, just don’t promote it. Those that need it will use it, those that don’t will never know about it.
ZFS implementation should have not ben announced by SUN. They should have known better not to mention anything before Apple does… just remember how Apple switched to nVidia when ATI made a mistake by telling that their products will be in the new Apple that were going to be announced the next day.
I am just curious if Apple would still implement ZFS later or would they come up with a version of their own… just to screw SUN for mentioning Apple’s product features before hand.
Too bad. A move to ZFS would have indicated that Apple is getting serious about the Enterprise sector.
Gottcha!….suckers
Gottcha!….suckers
Gottcha!….suckers
Gottcha!….suckers
The guys at The Register had this to say about ZFS: ZFS is a high-performance 128-bit file system originally created by Sun for its Solaris operating system. It’s distributed as an open source package”.
* 128-bit file system … yummy, but not required for 99.99% of OSX Clients
* open source … no problem with suits for ‘unauthorized use’
* the link to Mac4ever (above) shows that ZFS is supported on 10.5
It sounds like the bases are covered.
DLMeyer – the Voice of G.L.Horton’s Stage Page Pod Cast
What happened was that someone blabbed it and Apple nixed it. When will CEO’s learn not to pre-announce stuff in Apple’s product line? It happened to a graphics manufacturer (ATI, I believe) 3 or so years ago and they had to scramble to get back into good standing with Apple.
sun is almost dead, bunch of academic loosers
Well it’s simple what happened
Steve Jobs only touted 10 of the 300 new features of Leopard at the Keynote.
ZFS is one that obviously didn’t make the top ten list.
What Apple can do is carefully watch what of the remaining 289 features appear on the internet and find the moles in the hords of developers.
Bet Apple dropped ZFS after Sun talked about it pre-Keynote.
The Sun official is lying ZFS is the top secret feature.
What!? No brain dead off topic political posturings in this thread?!!!
Frankly I’m surprised…and by Frankly I don’t mean the French Franc or Frank Sinatra, or Benjamin Franklin, or the Franking privileges enjoyed by member of Congress, or FrankFurters, or Anne Frank, or the song Franky and Johnny (which was not gay by the way)…
Everyone…PLEASE leave political comments and attempts to intuit meaning or intent from some advertising effort or misstatement. PLEASE STOP! You are wasting our bandwidth
I have little doubt that ZFS would have been one of the top secret items in Leopard.
Then that putz at Sun wanted to blow the secret by announcing it first.
Steve Jobs pulled ZFS when he heard a top executive mouthing off.
I for one am glad Steve pulled it. That will teach that a$$hole from thinking he can reveal top secret items before Steve.
Bet you the Sun executive is trying to explain himself directly to Steve and Steve isn’t returning his calls.
it’s not like hfs+ is limited in any way
check this out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus
and hfs+ has a theoretical maximum of 16 exabytes
ie; A LOT
Bush is a closet Democrat.
Apple should buy Sun just to FIRE that stupid SOB, and then take him out back and kick his a$$. Stupid idiot.
MW: he has no “class”
Do you guys really believe ZFS was the boot file system in Leopard and was then taken out because of what Sun said last week?!?!?
I guarantee the copies of Leopard that the WWDC attendees received were pressed at least 2 weeks ago.
ZFS is not ready that’s all. When it can be booted from so that you only need to have one “volume” on your Mac then it will become the file system. Unless of course something even better comes along in the meantime.
LOL. My magic word is “men” 😀
ZFS would be an awesome addition to OS X, but I doubt you’d see it on the Leopard desktop. If Apple does anything with it, you’ll see it in the server version, where Apple is really trying to make a dent in the data center market. That’s were ZFS is truly suited. HFS is a bit long in tooth and there’s too many hacks to add ACLs. It took nearly 4 revisions of 10.4 server to get ACLs stable. I’ve managed to hit a sweet spot where it all works (except for certain apache / Active Directory connections).
I’d welcome ZFS as addition to HFS, but I wouldn’t want it to totally replace it.
I’ll bet it will be a formatting option, just like UFS (UNIX File System) is a formatting option now.
And I don’t think the “stupid SOB” at Sun was being stupid. It was probably a planned “leak” (requested by Apple) of incorrect information to generate more interest for WWDC among the geek community.
Well, we’ve seen 3.33% of the new features in Leopard and while what’s been shown so far is definitely an improvement over current releases, I’ve seen absolutely nothing that qualifies as a “Top Secret” feature. I hope somewhere in the other 96.66% new features are some really incredible top secrets that they’re keeping from us.
MDN word: born as in Leopard is starting to look still-born.
Thank you, PR. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Just misinformation. They’re preparing ZZZFS+, which is sort’a like Now you see it, now you dzz z Z Z.
I will bet you that ZFS is one of the other secret features that was not revealed yesterday at WWDC. This is just a statement by Apple to keep everyone off track.
That happens when you do “The Premature Ejaculation of Information”. You are Fired! Sorry can´t help you!. We do as we fit!. Go! Steve!
I was disappointed with the announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote, but that ZFS has got me thinking:
What if when Leopard ships in October, it includes 2 or 3 really disruptive top secret features?
I can’t believe Steve made us wait 6 months to announce Stacks and Quick Look…
That’s too bad.
Jobs payback for trying to upstage him. Sun are utter, complete dumbasses for vomiting this news.
I am glad Jobs is dispensing punishment.
:: Quoted from the Information Week Forum ::
…An Apple spokesperson called us Tuesday seeking to clarify Croll’s statement. Croll was apparently supposed to indicate that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system.” …
Michael Singer
InformationWeek – West Coast Editor
:: End Quote ::
If he is indeed from InformationWeek, an updated correction story will be posted soon.
Assuming what he said is true, ZFS will be an option in Leopard as it is in the betas.
The CEO of Sun probably doesn’t know what part of ZFS Apple will be supporting. Someone asked him a question and he tried to answer it. But I bet he knew that his comment would pump up his stock price temporarily. I bet he sold a few shares yesterday…
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Apple is putting ZFS as an option in Disk Utility for formatting. Zetabyte will be an awesome file system, but Apple needs more time in learning how to implement it properly.
I still think Apple buying Sun would be a good thing. Apple could use ZFS for all of their xServes. And Apple would own Java patents. Sun also has many other technologies that could benefit Apple (for instance, JINI).
At this point in Sun Microsystem’s lifeline, I would think Apple could get a good deal. And they would also have some decent campus space around the Bay Area.
I cannot belive how many ‘experts’ in Apple business practices on here actually believe that Steve/Apple would pull support for ZFS just because it was “blabbed” about by a Sun exec!?
Yes this has happened for SUPPLIERS of components to things Apple builds.
However, making ZFS the default file system for Mac OS X is not a SMALL “gee who shall we buy are parts from” decision that can be switched on or off in the matter of a few days depending on whether someone blabbed about it – I mean come on people get a grip!!!
It is likely that the Sun exec spoke too soon, in that ZFS isn’t currently part of Apple’s plans for OS X , however to think that Steve and Apple suddenly dropped what would be a fairly BIG change to the file system in Mac OS X within a few days of someone shooting their mouth off is trying to fit past behaviour to EVERYTHING that EVER happens in the future.
I have no doubt Steve and Apple may exercise their right to reject supply from companies that have talkative execs in the future, as they have in the past, however lets be realistic about it, and recognise that isn’t always going to happen, let alone be possible sometimes, even is Steve and Apple want to. For example, if someone at Intel leaks details of an upcoming Apple product feature based on Intel technology, do you REALLY think Steve and/or Apple will be able to ditch Intel chips in Macs at the drop of a hat to punish them???
I doubt it!!!
Fools!
my 2 cents,
Luke
I’m thinking that the Keynote sucked (yes, it did suck — You don’t “announce” things that have already been announced; e.g. 2/3 of the keynote), is because Apple want people to buy computers over the next four months and if they think that Leopard will be over-the-top cool then they’ll hold off.
I, for one, am underwhelmed. Which means that if I were thinking of waiting until October to buy I would probably decide the wait wasn’t worth it. If somehow Leopard really rocks, I’ll pay $129. And if not, I’ll keep Tiger and I’ll have enjoyed the computer for four months.
I have to say that that was the weakest Keynote ever. I was utterly offended that Steve would have the gall to simply parrot his own words from six months ago.
Remember when he started showing the iPhone ad and then stopped it halfway and said something like, “Okay. I assume you all have already seen that”? Well how about applying his own logic to the entire friggin’ keynote?
Yes, we’ve already seen it. If you have nothing new to say then show a movie for the hour and a half or bring back Mayer for some singing. If you’ve really got 300 new features — and you say the entire keynote will be on Leopard, how about not wasting our time?
… on the old stuff.
(pardon the typos.)
p+
Here lies the lesson…..
THOU SHALT NOT MAKE ANNOUNCEMENTS BEFORE APPLE iNC IS READY TO OR ALLOWS YOU TO, OR ELSE THY PRODUCT SHALT BE DROPPED LIKE A LEAD BALLOON!
For ZFS, read wot that Graphics Accelerator card company did years ago. Apple Computers dropped their GPU card after the initial launch because the CEO dared to announce it before the Angle poise imac was launched!
Apple inc. have dropped big name companies when they have been found wanting in the past, why should they stop at Sun Micro Systems?