“Intel is promising availability of 3D Xpoint non-volatile memory (NVM) this year, at least in their Optane SSDs,” Robin Harris reports for ZDNet. “That has led some to speculate that MacBooks, most of which already use the super fast NVMe interface, will jump to Optane SSDs in the next year.”
Harris reports, “Here’s why it won’t happen.”
“After a brief flirtation with the 21st century ZFS file system, the Mac OS file system team has continued to patch HFS+, a relic of 80s, and whose design bears a strong resemblence to the RT-11 file system from 1970,” Harris reports. “Unlike Microsoft, who has done much to modernize NTFS under the hood, Apple has been content to bake HFS+ into ever more services, making updating the Mac storage stack even more difficult.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, we remember dreaming of ZFS, at least, for Mac OS X way back when, but, alas, such dreams have long since been filed under “pipe.” Looking forward to WWDC, as always!
SEE ALSO:
Former Apple engineer delivers ZFS support to Mac OS X – January 31, 2012
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
HFS is an abomination. Apple should have ended it years ago.
I wish there was a nice clean way to change the default directory of the core folders in the Home folder.
What about the ability to create symlinks to other locations called Music, Videos etc?
Until SSDs hit an affordable price for 1TB I’m stuck with my Hybrid drive. If you could change the default location to a NAS it would help a lot – my OS and core files on the SSD, my content on the NAS.
You can change the location of your home folder to anywhere you want… it doesn’t have to live in /Users… thats just the default…
Any Apple replacement to ZFS should be named iFS.
/s
No matter how many times that people like me point out how horribly short-sighted Apple is, and how far behind they are falling in critical technical issues, the fanboys just attack the messenger.
The fle system matters. By not preparing OS X to be ready for byte-addressable memory, Apple risks falling yet another generation behind in system speed and data integrity. But Cook instead is making Apple a fashion company. The last 3 OS X major releases were fashion and fluff, flay gray text and hidden controls and whitewashed GUI, with zero improvement to performance or usability.
Cook and Ive have made zero progress on fundamental Mac updates for the future, they have Fedorighi busy trying to get iCloud to work.
Hell, Apple’s bean counters couldn’t even roll out Skylake in a timely manner to its waiting Mac customers. It’s just getting more embarrassing all the time. Is anyone at Apple paying attention to the Mac platform at all?
The 5K iMac was the last real innovation in the Mac line. It even came out cheaper than the Dell 5K monitor alone.
Other than that everything in the Mac line has been marginally evolutionary or a mild step backward in power user usability. Mac OS X has either hidden necessary controls, made them only accessible through Terminal, or removed them completely.
The extreme example is Mac OS X Server… and we all know how that is fairing. From a high of the XServe where even Oracle was loudly and publicly telling people to by XServes instead of Windows, Linux, or UNIX servers to there being extremely few cases today where XServes are truly superior to and justifiable as opposed to Windows, Linux, or Unix boxes.
Tim and the rest seem to have taken Steve’s statement back in the 90s to heart, in the extreme, “If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”
The problem is the Mac is still a workhorse that many, many of us NEED (not just use). We NEED better Macs. Our tasks are getting more complex every day. Even I recently purchased a custom built Linux box to run very complex simulations which brought a $10,000 variant of the current Mac Pro to its knees. (Never mind that the Linux box cost me under $7,000 all in.) Why is there no Mac to support my needs?
The fact that Apple hasn’t pushed out OS 11 yet, but is still doing 10.11 and similar nomenclature, makes me think that they’re saving all of these upgrades for the new full version. I’ll anticipate that in 3-5 years, with the OS itself being fully rewritten with a new file system. Probably named iFS, as someone joked earlier.
We can only hope so.
I expected Apple to have OS XI released 3 years ago.
OpenZFS on OS X is still breathing:
https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/OpenZFS_on_OS_X
Apple is spending almost all development time on iOS versus Mac OSX and it shows!
Yeah, and all we got was ugly rose gold fashion phones with a walled garden OS.
Apple ignores the Mac at its peril.
One could argue that lack of investment in the Mac is causing Wall Street analysts to bet against Apple in the long run. Cook then plays right into their hands by clumsy releases of fashion accessories and hump-backed battery cases instead of truly groundbreaking computer performance.
I have the “humped back” case. It is fantastic. But you wouldn’t know because you are an idiot influenced by ” negative headline generating monkeys” typing on a keyboard. It is better than any other battery case out there.
Apple does not ignore the Mac. The walled garden is just fine thank you very much. You can have your “open” crap and the lack of security and all the viruses that come with it. You have nothing to offer us. My mac from 2011 going strong still. All pc’s from that time are all dead and running in some scrapyard.
I have the humped back case. It does indeed work great. And there is no reason Apple can’t make a phone that works just as well without it. It is a band-aid for an Apple design flaw.
Sad to say, but I think the development of OSX will always be dependent on what Apple’s goals are with iOS. When you consider how fast the chips will be in iOS devices in the next 2 to 5 years, and the continued evolution of the linkage between iOS devices and online supercomputers (eg- you iPad with IBM apps accessing information from a Watson-like computer), I wonder how a Mac running OSX fits into that picture.
Apple led the personal computer revolution that freed computer users from mainframe administrative zealots.
Why is Apple joining IBM and the rest of the industry in forcing users back onto mainframes???????
I don’t like any part of it. iCloud, subscription software, rental software, it’s all crap.
Once in a while I want to be able to take my MacBook Pro to the park and do something by myself without being tracked, advertised, synced, notified, messaged, or in any other way disturbed. Why doesn’t Apple get it anymore ??????????