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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
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
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.
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.
"...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...
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.
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.
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?
On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?
My app launcher loads as soon as it's triggered (4 fingers swiped in). There is a weird 5ms glitch on the zoom in animation, but otherwise it loads in within a few ms, and scrolling is smooth. I'm on a M2 MBA macOS 26.3.1
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
A couple of revisions in Time Machine was just fine.
The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).
However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.
The worst feature of Time Machine is how it takes over every single display you have. Even though it only shows content on one screen, it feels the need to completely black out the others.
The "quality" Apple delivers is by now a complete joke. It's going south since over a decade, and this never stopped.
It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.
So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.
It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.
Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
You can't turn it on without an external drive attached, even though it saves local backups. It works if you mount a disk image and then point TM to it with the CLI.
It’s more tangential than unrelated. It’s how conversation naturally flows, and this is a discussion board. No need to fire up a new post.
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
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.
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?
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"
>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.
> 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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm still using my time capsule. I don't really trust the hard drive inside of it, but I basically use it to connect to an SSD that I attached to it. Unfortunately, Nest Wi-Fi, that I use as a router doesn't have any USBs, unlike some cheaper routers. I know that it's, I know that it will be gone after Tahoe. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about this. I mean, I don't really want to fool on us
I mean, it's basically just like a time machine backup plus, uh, a little bit of some older files that I don't want to keep on my main Mac.
seems like any NAS would take way more space than I would love to. I suppose one alternative would be actually getting some kind of like Beelink PC and then maybe setting up a proper home server, moving some of my side projects in there, running plex from it. The problem is that the current ram prices, it's a surprisingly expensive solution.
Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.
"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.
People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.
Because people will fill their iClouds. An important value proposition of iCloud is that customers pay for more space than they need. Time Machine grows to fill all available space.
I would have agreed if they hadn't put in the engineering effort to upgrade the backup disk image to APFS instead of HFS+. They wouldn't have done that if the plan was to deprecate it soon. (IIRC the next version of macOS is also dropping HFS+ support)
Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
> Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.
Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
I don't have any Linux/Windows machines, but I've seen nothing that would dissuade me from using it when I eventually migrate my current laptop to Asahi Linux.
As for IronWolf Pro drives, I chose them because they seem to have similar longevity to enterprise drives with less noise (my equipment is in a closet under the stairs).
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
Must have been a lot of years ago since Samba was introduced in Jaguar (2002), and SMB replaced AFP as the default for file sharing as of Mavericks (2013).
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)
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.
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.
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.
They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
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.
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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.
Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.
SMB2 came out with Vista and SMB3 was Win8 so they are not new protocols either.
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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.
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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
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
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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
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
"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.
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.
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Ironic, considering Linux is dropping a LOT of old devices from 7.1
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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.
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.
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macOS Tahoe still has floppy drive support.
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And soon I won't be able to run old 32bit binaries with the latest Linux Kernel. We all move on.
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> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
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Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.
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
Disks can be replaced.
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.
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.
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"...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...
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.
I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk
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> 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.
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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.
I've already built it: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.
> 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.
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.)
Yes this one seems unambiguously a good idea
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?
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On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?
Apple hardware team looking at Apple software team: You guys, everything OK over there?
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We put a supercomputer in a laptop just so the OS could struggle to draw a grid of icons. Peak modern engineering.
My app launcher loads as soon as it's triggered (4 fingers swiped in). There is a weird 5ms glitch on the zoom in animation, but otherwise it loads in within a few ms, and scrolling is smooth. I'm on a M2 MBA macOS 26.3.1
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
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It isn't even centered on my monitor, looks like an intern wrote it.
>How this possible in 2026?
Enshittification. When you're an ecosystem monopoly, people are forced to buy your shit no matter how bad it gets.
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Even ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.
A couple of revisions in Time Machine was just fine.
The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).
However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.
The worst feature of Time Machine is how it takes over every single display you have. Even though it only shows content on one screen, it feels the need to completely black out the others.
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The "quality" Apple delivers is by now a complete joke. It's going south since over a decade, and this never stopped.
It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.
So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.
It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.
Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
I stopped using it because the interface was wretched and it didn't need to be cutesy. Rsync found it's way back into the tool belt.
i wonder if support for DIY backup tools isn't prioritized when a future iCloud monthly subscription will be pushed eventually.
future iCloud monthly subscription?
I've been paying for iCloud storage since I don't know when.
Other issues with Time Machine:
- Very slow, even on an M4.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
You can't turn it on without an external drive attached, even though it saves local backups. It works if you mount a disk image and then point TM to it with the CLI.
On an unrelated note
If you know it's unrelated, why try to derail this discussion? Why not start another? What's the point?
Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs, instead of being judged on its own merits?
It’s more tangential than unrelated. It’s how conversation naturally flows, and this is a discussion board. No need to fire up a new post.
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
> Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs
How is this a criticism? Seems smart to me.
Makes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol
Are you thinking of Time Capsule? Time Machine is fully supported and I use it every day on Tahoe.
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Finally, TLS 1.2 is baseline, after having been released 18 years ago.
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://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...
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.
Unless I'm mixing it up, I still remember this as the infamous "wifi update"
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”,
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?
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.
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"
Completely unrelated but I love the layout / blog format of eclecticlight.co
>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.
> 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:
But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.
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!
Would you have any more info? I have both: adobe synctool + issues with smb shares
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.
> licensing, probably
Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.
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.
I regret the difficulty of mounting an SSH connection as a filesystem. It requires Fuse and giving permissions to the kernel.
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How is nfs on mac?
Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.
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.
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I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
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 ?
I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
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Can't they hire an extra dev per abandoned project to not abandon it?
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.
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?
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> 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!)
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I'm still using my time capsule. I don't really trust the hard drive inside of it, but I basically use it to connect to an SSD that I attached to it. Unfortunately, Nest Wi-Fi, that I use as a router doesn't have any USBs, unlike some cheaper routers. I know that it's, I know that it will be gone after Tahoe. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about this. I mean, I don't really want to fool on us
I mean, it's basically just like a time machine backup plus, uh, a little bit of some older files that I don't want to keep on my main Mac.
seems like any NAS would take way more space than I would love to. I suppose one alternative would be actually getting some kind of like Beelink PC and then maybe setting up a proper home server, moving some of my side projects in there, running plex from it. The problem is that the current ram prices, it's a surprisingly expensive solution.
This update broke my workflow! I use Netatalk [1] with AFP to share files between my Macintosh 512ke and MacBook via AppleTalk.
Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to re-enable AFP [2].
1. https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk
2. https://xkcd.com/1172/
Wouldn't the TimeCapsules still work over wired connections, just like any other hard drive, even if the networking AFP protocol support is dropped?
No, afp is application layer. It doesn't matter how the device is connected at layers 1 or 2.
You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.
Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
Hence "next". And by local I meant directly connected drives.
I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.
"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.
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They switched the default protocol from AFP to SMB a long time ago.
They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.
The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience
People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.
Because people will fill their iClouds. An important value proposition of iCloud is that customers pay for more space than they need. Time Machine grows to fill all available space.
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I would have agreed if they hadn't put in the engineering effort to upgrade the backup disk image to APFS instead of HFS+. They wouldn't have done that if the plan was to deprecate it soon. (IIRC the next version of macOS is also dropping HFS+ support)
Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.
As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.
I like having control over my backups.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
https://github.com/lookfirst/ResticScheduler
The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.
Good nudge to look into using CCC. Which folders do you backup? It seems slower than TM so thinking of backing up home folder only
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
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This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.
also known as "prescient"
> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
> Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
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Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.
I was under the impression that's how SMB TimeMachine backups work currently
Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
I don't have any Linux/Windows machines, but I've seen nothing that would dissuade me from using it when I eventually migrate my current laptop to Asahi Linux.
As for IronWolf Pro drives, I chose them because they seem to have similar longevity to enterprise drives with less noise (my equipment is in a closet under the stairs).
Does the mac still lack a SMB/CIFS browser?
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
macOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.
Must have been a lot of years ago since Samba was introduced in Jaguar (2002), and SMB replaced AFP as the default for file sharing as of Mavericks (2013).
It's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.