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AFP client to be removed

mikeboss

mikeboss

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 13, 2009
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switzerland
it's not clear if this will happen with macOS 16.

www.heise.de

Discontinued and soon to disappear: Apple's network protocol AFP

SMB has long since replaced AFP in macOS, but users were still able to use the AFP client for network connections. This will soon come to an end.
www.heise.de www.heise.de

mg-91b5fcc7-w1827-w828-w1300.jpg
 
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mikeboss said:
the client is going to be removed. AFP server is gone since quite some time already...
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Ok.. well, AFP has been deprecated for nearly a decade. Big Sur removed AFP sharing. This news site only news site referring to AFP client removal but does not site its source except obscure reference to Apple "first announced this step in advance versions of macOS 15.5 Sequoia." (15.5 release notes? tech notes?) I guess we'll find out when the first betas of macOS 16 roll out this summer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Bigwaff said:
Ok.. well, AFP has been deprecated for nearly a decade. Big Sur removed AFP sharing. This news site only news site referring to AFP client removal but does not site its source except obscure reference to Apple "first announced this step in advance versions of macOS 15.5 Sequoia." (15.5 release notes? tech notes?) I guess we'll find out when the first betas of macOS 16 roll out this summer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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today we got the official announcement from Apple:

What's new for enterprise in macOS Sequoia - Apple Support

Learn about the enterprise content that Apple has released for macOS Sequoia.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
 
So that I am understanding this correctly, does this just mean that future macOS versions will not be able to connect to older Macs running an AFP server (like a Mac running 10.4 Tiger or something)? Or am I misunderstanding this?

If that's the case, I guess we will all maybe need another bridge Mac in the mix for some of those older Macs to connect to on both ends, with AFP and SMB.
 
Slix said:
If that's the case, I guess we will all maybe need another bridge Mac in the mix for some of those older Macs to connect to on both ends, with AFP and SMB.
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Which you are really going to want. Because Tiger's implementation of the SMB protocol is god-awful.
 
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eyoungren said:
Which you are really going to want. Because Tiger's implementation of the SMB protocol is god-awful.
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I've been using my 10.6 Snow Leopard Server Mac Mini has my go-between Mac for a while now, it seems to work well for things like this. I guess we'll see how it works in the future.
 
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AirPort Disk functionality (which I believe the Time Capsule piggybacked on) only supported AFP. I really doubt Apple's going to re-engineer the software at this point, so those will likely be EOL for any sort of network disk functionality once support is removed from macOS.
 
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DankeBrutus said:
From what I have heard and experienced the current implementation of SMB isn't great either.
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Yeah, it's not. But it's better than it was during the PowerPC era. Back then if you wanted to properly connect to Windows servers you either needed DAVE or you needed to shut off the majority of the server's security protocols in order to get a Tiger Mac to connect. Then you had to worry about Finder issues with copying, deleting and saving files.

Not such a worry in the less than 20 employee company I worked for, but a major concern if you were a large business.
 
The biggest problem for me will be all the thousands of legacy folders and files we have that have characters in the name that SMB doesn't support, leaving completely gibberish names without even a file extension. We'll have to keep at least one older mac around so we know what the file even is, or probably the more proper solution is to run Better Finder Rename and letting it rename them.
 
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eyoungren said:
Yeah, it's not. But it's better than it was during the PowerPC era. Back then if you wanted to properly connect to Windows servers you either needed DAVE or you needed to shut off the majority of the server's security protocols in order to get a Tiger Mac to connect. Then you had to worry about Finder issues with copying, deleting and saving files.
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It's funny you mention having to disable security protocols for SMB back then because I have had that experience with NFS on Sequoia.
I have a few NFS shares exported on my LAN. On my Linux machines they connect just fine, NFS is all set up and shares are mounted at boot. It's wonderful.
On macOS? An entirely different story. Firstly, having to configure /etc/fstab with vi? Why? I just pinned the shares in Finder with the nfs://... link. Secondly, no matter what ports, services, or IPs I opened up on UFW my Macs simply would not connect to any NFS share behind it. I had to disable UFW to connect to the shares.
 
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Just another way for Apple to force migration to newer hardware, even when older Mac being used as file servers work great now it won’t be able to connect to it without using a less secure SMB. :rolleyes:
 
JosephAW said:
Just another way for Apple to force migration to newer hardware, even when older Mac being used as file servers work great now it won’t be able to connect to it without using a less secure SMB. :rolleyes:
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I wish Apple kept updating the Time Capsule. Obviously in the world of self-hosted Plex servers and services the wants of home server people have expanded but the Time Capsule is still a capable file server because, frankly, file servers don't need too much oomph.
 
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I'll chime in here. I have a lot to say about AFP vs SMB. I have a TrueNAS server, which will remain on 13.3 (or whatever the last version with netatalk installed ends up being).
My TrueNAS server is configured with both AFT and SMB. SMB is horrid and I hate it. I do not understand why Apple got on the SMB train. I pretty much only connect to my NAS using SMB on my phone and my iPad, as those are unable to use SMB. They also don't do a lot of transfers to\from my NAS either.

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 running Mojave, Sequoia, and Windows 11. I have Sonarr\Radarr, and some other crap running on Sequoia so its always connected to the NAS if its running. About a year ago I started connecting it using only AFP instead of SMB, here's why.
- SMB was slower, even though everywhere I've read claims today, it shouldn't be slower.
- SMB constantly drops out. It would disconnect when trying to copy anything over 1GB+.
- SMB will say I do not have privileges to delete or move files around. This is completely random. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Now on Windows, the only issue I have with SMB is the occasional permissions issue, but I've pretty much got that ironed out. I don't often use Windows, and haven't booted into the Win 11 install in over 6 months I'd guess.

AFP doesn't have any of these problems, and always "just works". Which is why Apple designed it in the first place.

Netatalk is still supported, and aside from needing a manual configuration (which is pretty simple to set up, especially compared to SAMBA) works pretty good.

Netatalk is active and supported to install on both x86 macOS as well as ARM on homebrew. And I will definitely end up using it if macOS ever loses the client functionality. In the future if I ever need to upgrade TrueNAS further (I don't know why I'd ever need to), it is very simple to set up a jail and run Netatalk from that.
 
Project Alice said:
I do not understand why Apple got on the SMB train.
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They got on that train because at a certain point customers who owned Macs also owned PCs with Windows, or large companies had PC servers. Customers wanted to connect to their PCs and large companies needed their employees to connect to their servers.

At one time Apple licensed AFP (see FSM (File Services for Macintosh)), but probably based on what Apple charged for the licensing and the limitations of FSM, it didn't seem to get any traction.

But, Apple being Apple, when they got on the SMB train they did it their way. So, the SMB you have on Macs up to Mavericks is Apple's version of SMB and NOT the standard, vanilla-flavored version of SMB that comes with every version of Windows.

And that is why Thursby software became huge. Because they offered two solutions to get standard SMB on a Mac. DAVE for Mac clients, and AdmitMac for PC servers. This allowed PC owners and large corporations to more easily connect Macs to PCs and servers. Apple finally got with the times around Mavericks and since they were going all in on STANDARD SMB, instead of their version of it, they deprecated AFP.

I suspect Apple still doesn't have it entirely right. I have issues with SMB and my work issued M2 Mac over a VPN. But the whole point was to better align Mac users with connecting to PCs and PC servers.
 
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