Comment by xp84
1 year ago
Does anybody else think that it would make sense for Apple and Microsoft to just get in a room and horse trade a few things like this, if they cared about user experience? Cross-license both APFS and NTFS, and share any internal documentation under NDA so that external drives can use modern formats with safety features like journaling without locking users in.
Oh wait, I just answered my question.
I suspect there wouldn't be an agreement on a minimum set of features for a modern filesystem, even just for external disks, even if you limited it to flash storage devices to avoid all the complexities of spinning platter latency.
After all, there's no such agreement on Linux either - we just have all the Linux vendor options available.
Let me clarify, I don't expect two vendors like that to merge filesystem specs. I just think they should have first-class support for reading and writing on each others' default (NTFS and APFS) filesystems because the alternative is that a user who has a hard drive full of their important documents can't switch between Mac and PC without buying 100% more storage with which to do a complicated filesystem-migration exercise -- and let's be honest, only an absolute nerd (like us) would even understand what that is. Others would just plug in the NTFS disk to the Mac, see the popup saying "unreadable," shrug and give up (or worst case, format it not understanding that means erasing).
This is the kind of thing a reasonable government would just tell them they had to do by virtue of being a fully locked-in duopoly, just like they should tell Apple and Google that users should be able to choose to install an alternat app store.
This is a disk image format so why not VHD? It seems like it's open enough and supports what a virtual disk needs what do we gain with yet another file that's a disk type?