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throw0101c
runlevel1
I still use AFP on my NAS for a few reasons:
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.
adastra22
Yeah I recently migrated my NAS and took the opportunity to switch from AFP to SMB for my Time Machine backups. There were so many problems like the ones you describe that I gave up and went back to AFP. Looks like I'm going to be forced to spend a weekend with Claude figuring this out.
tedd4u
If you're using Synology, a couple years ago they finally published a help article that lists (IIRC) 3-5 settings important to switching from AFP to SMB. I had tried before that but to no avail.
procaryote
I gave up on timecapsule because performance has gotten worse and worse year over year. I replaced it with a periodic rsync backup to a NAS that is in turn backed up in other ways
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
TimTheTinker
They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
GeekyBear
It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.
wazoox
Yeah but AFP is still performing way better than SMB on Mac for any fast networking. Like 10GigE and faster. Apple SMB stack is a disaster, and thoroughly unprofessional. NFS is faster, too, but unfortunately the Finder, being the rat nest of bugs it is, has often trouble with NFS shares.
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giantrobot
Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.
stackskipton
SMB2 came out with Vista and SMB3 was Win8 so they are not new protocols either.
winocm
That just ended up inadvertently reminding me, Windows Vista is actually almost old enough to be at the minimum legal drinking age in the US.
Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.
Time really does fly.
jychang
I've added support for Samba 4 (running SMB3) to the Time Capsule so it can work with modern macOS: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
wtallis
Where "new" in this case could be a NAS running Samba from 2011? Samba added official support for Time Machine much later, but I think it was possible on earlier versions with some extra steps.
throw0101c
Samba 4.8 from 2018:
* https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.8.0.html ("vfs_fruit")
* https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...
giantrobot
I only meant new as in someone currently owns a Time Capsule and has to replace it with something "new" that supports newer SMB versions.
Melatonic
SMB1 has major security issues but even those ignored (which a lot of people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about) it's also slow as hell on MacOS
riffic
> people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about
philosophically I would beg to differ about any premise assuming we can trust the castle and moat model. Even on home networks.
SebastianKra
Have they, by chance, also fixed the issue where MacOs' SMB implementation is unusably slow when copying many small files?
A backup of my 2TB MacBook literally takes weeks.
TMWNN
What I have done to maintain the integrity of my Time Machine backups (to UnRAID, via SMB):
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.
bborud
Did they ever work? No, seriously. I've had a couple of them and the few times I really could have used them I discovered that they represented the worst backup solution I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. Slow, very hard to use beyond their primary integration with the OS (which isn't good to begin with), there's really no good way to keep an eye on how they are doing (what's actually backed up, if it is still there) and the performance is worse than any hand rolled solution I've ever used.
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.
sersi
I just wish the new CEO decides to do a snow leopard release. Also change the macos release to when it's done instead of yearly
jychang
For those that are interested: I've managed to build Samba 4 and get it running on a Apple Time Capsule https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
pvtmert
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
ryandrake
"Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior. I can run the latest Linux kernel and still have access to an internal floppy disk drive if I wanted to, yet billion dollar companies can't seem to manage to support 10 year old stuff.
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.
_verandaguy
The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.
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.
miki123211
AFAIK, Linux has a policy that any change you make must not break existing kernel features, and if it does, you have to fix them yourself.
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.
TheJoeMan
There's somewhere in the ballpark of 166,000 employees at Apple, just unfathomable scale [1]. It is not unreasonable to ask that someone specific is responsible for each particular small feature and ensuring it keeps working. Trying to apply an economic analysis to such a "free as in beer" operating system does not seem to work well. Consider the question of "how many small holes can you have in your wooden sailing ship"?
huijzer
> The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.
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
lenerdenator
Ideally, at a certain point, you'd have some sort of upstream FLOSS project where you could let John Q. Public do that sort of low-level, maintenance-only stuff, while the proprietary "value adds" are closed source, until it becomes financially attractive to FLOSS them.
IIRC, that could exist for MacOS in the form of Darwin.
mschuster91
> 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.
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...
reaperducer
The economics make the reasoning obvious, though
These arguments fall apart when you remember that Apple has several trillion dollars at hand. It's not some shoestring startup.
tracker1
Ironic, considering Linux is dropping a LOT of old devices from 7.1
yjftsjthsd-h
It's my understanding that those are (mostly?) devices where they legitimately have reason to believe there are zero users. In particular, there's a pattern where someone will discover that Linux has a driver that hasn't actually worked for a long time, and nobody's complained, so then they remove it.
Ar-Curunir
Just this week we've seen Linux talking about dropping support for some older hardware precisely because attacks against it were becoming easier with LLMs.
joe_mamba
Do you have a detailed source for this? I want to read more about it.
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.
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undefined
retired
macOS Tahoe still has floppy drive support.
ryandrake
Really? Like actual internal floppy drives, and not just USB floppy drives (which even Windows still supports)?
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.
Elidrake24
And soon I won't be able to run old 32bit binaries with the latest Linux Kernel. We all move on.
MYEUHD
Umm no?
> 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.
halapro
Ok what do you suggest? Every feature ever written should be supported in perpetuity even if 3 people are using it? Clearly you didn't think this through. Should 2026 computers have a ISA interface as well?
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.
throwaway270925
> Should 2026 computers have a ISA interface as well?
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/
goalieca
Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.
swiftcoder
It may not be the easiest surgery in the world, but you can replace the hard drive in a Time Capsule. You'll probably want to replace the power supply too after this much time
kgwgk
Disks can be replaced.
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sleepybrett
wasn't it capped at 3tb? is the drive swappable to something bigger? They discontinues them in 2018, the wifi in them is old, single disk (no raid).. better to just pick up a multidrive nas or use cloud backups. What we should be asking for is timemachine backends for cloud providers.
TimTheTinker
It's not "officially" supported, but iFixit has a guide for swapping the drive on a time capsule. I used mine with a 4TB drive for years with no trouble.
sleepybrett
Sure, but still just a single drive.
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.
JumpCrisscross
"...if you have an Apple silicon Mac and AFP support is dropped from macOS 27, that would leave you unable to upgrade without replacing your network storage."
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
bayindirh
That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware.
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.
trillic
I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.
snapetom
One of my COVID projects was to set up a networked Time Machine backup on Raspberry Pi.
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.
wang_li
Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.
JumpCrisscross
> That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware
Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.
bayindirh
I believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
daneel_w
Netatalk has been around for like 25 years: https://github.com/Netatalk/Netatalk
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.
jychang
I've already built it: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.
red_admiral
> will require connections to certain servers to be made using at least TLS 1.2
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.
wging
Longer than that, even. A similar requirement for iOS apps was in the cards 10 years ago. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=12212016b
(Yes, this article is about an extension of the deadline. I don't remember what happened after that.)
Overpower0416
Fun fact, GCP cloud run still accepts TLS 1.1 connections by default. You can enforce higher versions only with a load balancer
ifwinterco
Yes this one seems unambiguously a good idea
reaperducer
So I should have to e-waste my printer, scanner, and wireless card reader that only exist on my LAN, and that I connect to via a web interface just because… reasons?
mirashii
If you read the article and the linked documentation, you'll see that those things aren't in the list of what this change applies to.
tiffanyh
I’m reminded of that time 10-years ago when Apple rewrote parts of its networking code (discovery/mDNSResponder), and it caused so many issues they had to revert the code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026192
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...
MBCook
They’re possibly dropping a protocol they’ve been saying they’d drop for years, and tightening connection validation.
This is nothing like the mDNS stuff.
traderj0e
Unless I'm mixing it up, I still remember this as the infamous "wifi update"
post-it
Why is it that Apple products attract blogspam titles?
> 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”,
pvtmert
I originally added a different title: Apple is dropping AFP/TimeMachine support in macOS 27.
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?
troad
I was also surprised by this. The post appears to contain next to no actual information.
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.
rock_artist
In comparison to other 'changes' Apple usually do those one are realistic. Dropping deprecated networking practices that worth upgrading (meaning, if you already have newer macOS clients mostly with apple stack, update your servers)
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)
shantara
>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…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.
realityfactchex
> 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
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
yobert
I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!
catoc
Would you have any more info? I have both: adobe synctool + issues with smb shares
p_ing
Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
kalleboo
> licensing, probably
Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.
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traderj0e
Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.
eastbound
I regret the difficulty of mounting an SSH connection as a filesystem. It requires Fuse and giving permissions to the kernel.
traderj0e
I used to do that a lot in some old versions of OS X, but then MacFUSE got abandoned and picked up as osxfuse, then that broke then got fixed repeatedly with several Mac updates, and I gave up.
somat
How is nfs on mac?
Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.
wazoox
NFS works way better than SMB, but the Finder is not without its troubles. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes to display a folder for reasons, mostly.
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.
daneel_w
With the exception of summed size of selected items, the Finder has all of that. Help yourself to the "View->Show Status Bar" menu option. Also, "View->Show View Options->Calculate All Sizes" to show storage size for directories.
nubinetwork
I'm more surprised they made it the default... with a Unix backend, why didn't they improve/expand nfs?
kstrauser
I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
Melatonic
In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested).
How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?
j16sdiz
I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
cyberpunk
You can mount webdav — which has been more reliable for us.
p_ing
That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
WorldPeas
...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
akabul0us
When i saw the headline I briefly allowed myself to hope that DNS settings would no longer be set universally (requiring manual intervention when switching networks if not using DHCP) but of course it's nothing useful and only "Apple is breaking stuff because they can"
amelius
Can't they hire an extra dev per abandoned project to not abandon it?
Someone1234
You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.
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.
applfanboysbgon
Yes, writing and maintaining less code is great for a developer. We can follow this to the logical extreme and marvel at how easy it is to write and maintain a program whose only function is to print "hello, world" to the console. Nevermind the users, what do they matter?
Someone1234
By the very nature of assigning development time to these antiquated features, you're assigning them away from other features, bug fixes, or requests that may have a larger user reach.
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.
zimpenfish
> You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.
cf Linux removing old network drivers this week for the same reason (without the hand-wringing that this Apple announcement is getting!)
saghm
Is the code that Apple is removing support for open source? The Linux drivers could at least plausibly be picked up and used by someone who really wants to, so it doesn't seem to be a fair comparison
celeryd
Finally, TLS 1.2 is baseline, after having been released 18 years ago.
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Time Capsule has been unsupported since 2018 (last shipped 2013):
* 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.