For my fellow Fusion Drive users...you’re welcome!
Actually I’d rather keep HFS+ for another year or two to make sure APFS is 100 percent safe.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Craig Federighi Says Apple Intends to Address APFS Support for Fusion Drives 'Very Soon'
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Actually I’d rather keep HFS+ for another year or two to make sure APFS is 100 percent safe.
Live on the edge. Apple wouldn’t release it if it wasn’t ready.
Evil grin??? No... that’s my normal look... why you ask???
I predict that APFS updates will be bundled with copies of Half Life 3 and affordable health care. As a bonus, Apple will offer 1st party Fusion to SSD upgrade kits priced simularly to cost of PC SSD drives. Just drop your Mac off at the local Apple store to have the upgrade done.
I can dream, can’t I?
I can dream, can’t I?
Not sure what you're asking.
HFS+ worked fine for decades, but APFS will be better in the long run. In the short term, however, there is no emergency and no urgent need to support APFS on Fusion Drives.
“Very soon” is much better than “soon” but not quite as good as “very very soon.” With “very soon” you have to be patient. Don’t forget that Apple is planning other things for “very soon” such as Mac Pro, Airplay 2, new Airpods, etc. So, they are very busy meeting the “very soon” timeframe.
APFS? No way and deal breaker until DiskWarrior works with it. Working also with external booting disks and Time Machine disks are also required.
As far as i can tell Apple still doesn't even support APFS on regular hard drives. Maybe I'm just confused about the meaning of the technical term "support", which I understood to include at least a substantial subset of the features offered by HFS+, such as resizing partitions and using the Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows on my MacBook. Unfortunately i somewhat ironically had to use Linux to install Windows on my MacBook because MacOS cannot manage to repartition a GPT disk with a APFS container that it created in the first place from a GPT disk with a HFS+ partition!
It merely implies that i had better convert the disk back to HFS+ if i want to do anything that complicated anymore, and frankly that sounds like an even bigger disaster than backing up my data and nuking the whole thing and starting over, or using Linux which is sounding like a better and better idea every day even on the desktop.
It merely implies that i had better convert the disk back to HFS+ if i want to do anything that complicated anymore, and frankly that sounds like an even bigger disaster than backing up my data and nuking the whole thing and starting over, or using Linux which is sounding like a better and better idea every day even on the desktop.
That would not be possible unless they are ready to face a huge law suite, which I would surely join.
Apple still ships iMacs with Fusion Drive (or has done it until very recently). There is no way in hell I would let them pull this sort of thing without paying for it. There’s a distant chance that they would recall all computers that shipped with the Fusion Deive and replace the HDD in them with an SSD, but this sort of campaign would be extremely expensive for Apple.
It’s a lot cheaper either to bring the support of the Fusion Drive in APFS or to continue to support HFS+ in future macOS releases.
Frankly, I don’t think anyone notices any difference between HFS+ and APFS, so Apple can continue the status quo for another decade.
[doublepost=1527071098][/doublepost]
The reason why they went with Fusion Drive in Mac Mini and iMac was due to a high cost of SSDs back then. Desktops have several time the amount of onboard storage as laptops. It was one thing to put a 512GB SSD in the most expensive MacBook Pro and it would have been quite another thing to put a 1TB SSD into an iMac. By Apple standards, such an SSD would add another $1,000 to the price of the iMac compared to the 1TB Fusion Drive.
Additionally, Apple started shipping 3TB Fusion Drive in iMacs a few years ago, when 3TB SSDs didn’t exist.
[doublepost=1527071246][/doublepost]
Dropping off an iMac is not so easy. There will be an Uber pick-up and delivery paid for by Apple
What on earth are you talking about? Do you think Craig Federighi replies to emails from random people believing that whatever information he discloses will remain a secret between him and said random person?
Do you think his thought is like, "This is confidential information that I wouldn't tell a journalist, but I will tell this one random person who emailed me and who I know nothing about. This way I can be certain that the information doesn't become public."?
I'll let you in on a little secret: If Craig Federighi wasn't fully aware and likely even intending that whatever interesting information he shares in an email with a random person would become public, he wouldn't do it.
As for "blasting worldwide to mac news websites", once again, what on earth are you talking about? The guy wrote Craig Federighi an email, he got a reply with information that he rightfully believed to be relevant for many people who read this website, and so he did the only plausible and right thing: He shared the information.
Fusion Drive is not a simple spanned volume. It’s a spanned volume on steroids. The blocks of data move in and out of the SSD component of the drive based on the frequency of access to those blocks of data and the type of data. Fusion Drive is pretty incredible even today. You can still save hundreds if not thousands of dollars with a DIY Fision Drive compared to an SSD-only Drive of the same capacity when you go for large capacities.
Please explain this. There haven't been a lot of problems mentioned (including on these forums). What are all the problems APFS has experienced that you hint at?
An optimist I see?
[doublepost=1527074293][/doublepost]
Gonna need more than another year or two for that wish to materialize.
Such as?
(Before you mention the sparse image free space bug: sure, that's a dataloss problem. But it's not a widespread issue, nor is it relevant to this discussion. Best as I can tell, there are no "problems on normal more-common drives" with APFS whatsoever.)
I don't understand your argument. You seem to argue that Apple would risk a lawsuit if APFS on Fusion Drive never ships, but then you offer not shipping APFS on Fusion Drive as an alternative?
Regardless of how incredible it is, the question remains whether the death of one of the two disks corrupts the filesystem for both disks, as would be the case with a typical spanning setup.
I think the Unicode consortium should focus more on implementing APFS.Yeah...they put APFS on the backburner so they can focus on emojis.
Will this tired meme just die already?
He said many things, e.g. High Sierra is secure, bug free and with APFS one doesn't need to wait for finding the size of a folder. None of it turns out to be true.
[doublepost=1527076957][/doublepost]
[doublepost=1527076957][/doublepost]
Not entirely accurate:
“In a submission to the Unicode Consortium today, Apple has proposed a suite of new “accessibility emojis”.”
(For the record, I’m not one of those who believe Apple have one team they continually re-task from software/hardware design to emoji creation!)
Craig Federighi said High Sierra is bug-free? Anyone who makes the outlandish claim that a non-trivial piece of software is "bug-free" probably shouldn't manage software engineers… but then again, I doubt he made such a claim.
Apple is part of the Unicode consortium. It's main members are IT companies (incl. but not limited to: Adobe Systems, Apple, Facebook, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, and SAP) but also a couple of governments (incl. a regional one) interested in ensuring that the alphabet of their respective languages get good support as well as several non-profit organisations, research institutes/universities.
However, anybody can submit proposals for new emojis (the podcast 'Welcome to Macintosh' has four excellent episodes on this process).
Last edited:
Apple doesn't have to make as many emoji proposals as they do, though. They choose to.
Support for Time Machine backups on APFS volumes is also a huge issue, in my mind. I hope that's fixed in 10.14, as well. These APFS issues are representative of Apple software in general over the last several of years. A yearly deluge of new features, most released with a number of shortcomings, and a seemingly endless wait for them to become fully baked. Siri is, by far, the premier example.
And you know that Apple is responsible for a disproportionate number of emoji proposals?
[doublepost=1527081398][/doublepost]
I'd say Siri is not a great example for this:
a) Can you name the yearly deluges of new Siri features?
b) It is very hard if not impossible to define when something like Siri becomes fully baked.
You had a much better beta experience than I had. (I also asked Craig half a year ago if there would be a path for APFS public beta testers to stay on APFS instead of reverting. He apologized and said no.)
Because the revert instructions on the Apple page were so bad, they were clearly not written with public beta experience level testers in mind I decided to hold at the last pre-release public beta so that the process and instructions could mature.
I decided to take the plunge to restore this past April. The process was a time and nerve consuming debacle. ((Even with the competent and motivated, but inexperienced, help of an Apple senior advisor, the process took about a week (counting weekend and advisor’s couple days off it was about 2 weeks total) to get the Mac working on the latest non beta release.))
Instructions on Apple page were better but still poor, having even contradictions in command line text to be entered in the console mode.
As best I can recall, (note, the following are a jumbled non linear series of remembrances. I would have kept detailed notes had I expected so much trouble and confusion) Mac didn’t want to (in no particular order):
- accept reformat storage from APFS to HSS extended journaled;
- using abootable USB, and for various reasons, couldn’t install current HS, nor first public HS, nor current S, IIRC but am not sure, I think we installed an older version of S, updated and then used the free upgrade.
- we multiple times also tried the web recovery and install and despite it supposedly supposed to I stall latest s/w, this kept coming back with MountainLion!
- we had trouble with the drives, couldn’t mount, couldn’t unmount, claims if missing recovery partition, having to unmount and separate the FusionDrive then refuse and remount;
- recovery from time machine backup was also a big fail as none of the newest 6 months of backups were offered in the restore process, I had to take the last backup prior to my first install of HS PB and APFS conversion;
- the reauthentication after all updates were installed and data from b/u were reinstalled was interesting, across 5 accounts, 1 Admin, 4 user, 4 created same time one later, there were 2 or3 different processes.
- in the last month I’ve had increasing issues that if I let the Mac sleep overnight, it gets confused and a) says there was a mail sync issue due to a network problem, b) can’t find any of the p/w data in the iCloud Keychain, c) can’t complete logout or restart without holding power button down (later could logout sometimes by restarting Finder LoL); these maladies were across each account;
- I removed Safari TP problems persisted;
- I did a PRAM reset and things were good for about a day before problems returned;
- I was waiting for new update to drop before calling Apple and asking for more help, but may have solved issue;
- I don’t know if it was one or some combination of the following, but I found that purple Safari TP had left behind a folder in the Library, so I went and deleted from each account; immediately after I could see that logging into and out of blue safari (also deleted history here too, mainly because I was getting bookmarked sites being suggested twice when typing a saved address) was back to its old snappiness. (I also saw there were folders left from Dropbox that hadn’t deinstalled do I removed these and for the moment removed malwarebytes).
- so far an overnight and half day sleep test shows the Mac doesn’t appear to be getting confused (but as with the temporary good behavior seen after pram reset, this current situation may be temporary);
- I’ve also had big syncing problems with photos, claiming the file is corrupt. Haven’t had time to delve into these though;
- also having problems for photos added to contacts on Mac to sync out to iCloud and iOS devices;
I’m of a mind to ask Craig that once HS w/APFS for FD is available, if I can use the last APFS data backup (it had new content, including a family vacation in France, that was lost) or if that will invite trouble.
In a way, I wish Apple would have offered a 1 or 2TB flash drive at a special price to allow FD Mac owners to retrofit off FD. In the end, it would probably be cheaper than having to try to support this storage option long term.
You surely remember his joke: "it's fully baked" which drew snickers from the assembled sycophants. I imagine a lot of people thought he was implying that the release was well-tested, competent, and ready to go. Standards have slipped at Apple. I don't trust them anymore and have not upgraded any of my macs to HS.
