8 ms·
Networking changes coming in macOS 27
- pvtmert 6mo agoAlthough TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
- goalieca 6mo agoGiven the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kgwgk 6mo agoDisks can be replaced.
- swiftcoder 6mo agoIt 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
- sleepybrett 6mo agowasn'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 6mo agoIt'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 6mo agoSure, 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.
- bananamogul 6mo agoI had an early ReadyNAS that was a champ for years. I wonder if the fact that it was based on SPARC had anything to do with its longevity.
- sleepybrett 6mo agothe one i have is my second readynas.. its a later one and is x86 but it's still kickin'. The first failed suddenly so i bought the second hoping to migrate the disks, but they changed the architecture so that wouldn't work. I determined that all that happened to the first was that the power supply gave up. Sourced one from ebay and it was back to working but i went ahead and did a migration then gave the old one to a friend. It's apparently also still doing just fine.
- iAMkenough 6mo agoFrom a risk assessment standpoint, I’ve seen my Time Machine backups corrupted much more frequently than I’ve experienced drive failure. Happened with both my Time Capsule and then my Synology RAID. It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.
- ryandrake 6mo ago"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 6mo agoThe 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.
- TheJoeMan 6mo agoThere'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"? [1] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/employees/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/employees/
- akerl_ 6mo agoIt’s not unreasonable to ask but they can and are saying “no”.
- laserlight 6mo agoNot that it impacts your argument significantly, but for the sake of completeness, Apple employs a huge number of retail employees.
- apparatur 6mo agoNext: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 6mo agoThe 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.
- FireBeyond 6mo agoI 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.
- apparatur 6mo agoFor me it was a key DB file inside the Photo library which Time Machine omitted from all backups and prevented me from restoring the library. Not fun.
- AlexandrB 6mo agoYeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
- 6mo ago
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago"...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 6mo agoThat "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.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoI believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
- trillic 6mo agoI 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk
- throw0101c 6mo agoTime Capsule has been unsupported since 2018 (last shipped 2013): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule 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.
- TimTheTinker 6mo agoThey discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
- GeekyBear 6mo agoIt'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 6mo agoYeah 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.
- NegativeLatency 6mo agoIIRC I had some really nasty move/duplication issues with NFS the last time I tried it in Finder.app. (and the whole UID mess)
- ninkendo 6mo agomacOS 26 still has a hard kernel panic if you try to mount an NFS share with krb5 auth but don’t have a valid Kerberos ticket. 100% reproducible. Every OS update I try mounting with no ticket, get a panic, fill in the error reporting dialog with a nice “hope you had a nice holiday break!” message or whatever is seasonally appropriate, with the same simple steps to reproduce. It’s just kinda comical at this point. My guess is kerberized NFS has absolutely zero users within Apple, and it’s likely hard to find an engineer there who even knows what Kerberos is anymore. I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.
- TimTheTinker 6mo agoUbiquiti 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.
- Melatonic 6mo agoHave 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
- TimTheTinker 6mo agoI 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).
- jshier 6mo agoWhat 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.
- nijave 6mo agoI was under the impression that's how SMB TimeMachine backups work currently
- shantara 6mo ago>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.
- kstrauser 6mo agoI can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
- j16sdiz 6mo agoI think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
- WorldPeas 6mo ago...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
- p_ing 6mo agoThat was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
- brigade 6mo agoStill true for extended attributes, which Finder and Spotlight love to query.
- cyberpunk 6mo agoYou can mount webdav — which has been more reliable for us.
- Melatonic 6mo ago
- StillBored 6mo agoDoes 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.
- slackfan 6mo agoIt's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.
- zdw 6mo agomacOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.
- hamdingers 6mo agoMust 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).
- mushufasa 6mo agoWouldn't the TimeCapsules still work over wired connections, just like any other hard drive, even if the networking AFP protocol support is dropped?
- ibejoeb 6mo agoNo, 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.
- shaguoer 6mo ago[flagged]
- amelius 6mo agoCan't they hire an extra dev per abandoned project to not abandon it?
- Someone1234 6mo agoYou 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.
- zimpenfish 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoIs 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
- dwaite 6mo agoThe AFP protocol was deprecated in 2013. The AFP server was removed in Big Sur, so over five years ago. This is removal of AFP client support. Apple's source is not public, but the protocol is still fully documented if someone wanted to create a new client and server. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/AFP/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000854-CH1-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne... However, they'd be better off just creating a driver and server around the open source Netatalk implementation.
- ndisn 6mo agoOn 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.
- giwook 6mo agoMakes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol
- amluto 6mo agoEven ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.
- Hamuko 6mo agoThe 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.
- xattt 6mo agoI don’t know what kind of time machines you’ve been using, but typically everything changes outside all the portholes when you time travel.
- post-it 6mo agoWhy 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 6mo agoI 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?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- troad 6mo agoI 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.
- red_admiral 6mo ago> 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.
- ifwinterco 6mo agoYes this one seems unambiguously a good idea
- reaperducer 6mo agoSo 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 6mo agoIf 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. https://support.apple.com/en-us/126655 https://support.apple.com/en-us/126655
- wging 6mo agoLonger than that, even. A similar requirement for iOS apps was in the cards 10 years ago. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=12212016b 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 6mo agoFun fact, GCP cloud run still accepts TLS 1.1 connections by default. You can enforce higher versions only with a load balancer
- tiffanyh 6mo agoI’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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026192 https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-10-4/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...
- ecliptik 6mo agoThis 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 https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk 2. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- ymolodtsov 6mo agoI'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.
- jychang 6mo agoFor 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 https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
- akabul0us 6mo agoWhen 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"
- sgt 6mo agoCompletely unrelated but I love the layout / blog format of eclecticlight.co
- celeryd 6mo agoFinally, TLS 1.2 is baseline, after having been released 18 years ago.
- rock_artist 6mo agoIn 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)
- dirasieb 6mo agobought an m4 air last september, still haven’t gotten around to set up time machine to my linux homelab server due to the giant fucking headache the entire setup process is