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v2club

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 13, 2011
161
0
That's pretty much my question: Why Apple doesn't support NTFS?
 

MikhailT

macrumors 601
Nov 12, 2007
4,582
1,325
That's pretty much my question: Why Apple doesn't support NTFS?

Because NTFS is owned by Microsoft and Microsoft doesn’t license it to anybody for their OS. The same reason Microsoft doesn’t support HFS+. It’s not technically legal to add support for it without a license and NTFS is not easy to reverse-engineer either.

Apple has to pay a lot of money to do that and the return on investments like that are low, not worth doing it.

Apple did add a read-only support for NTFS external drives.

If you want to add read/write support to your Mac, you can use a third party drivers to do that.
 

coopiklaani

macrumors member
Aug 12, 2011
43
0
UK
Because NTFS is owned by Microsoft and Microsoft doesn’t license it to anybody for their OS. The same reason Microsoft doesn’t support HFS+. It’s not technically legal to add support for it without a license and NTFS is not easy to reverse-engineer either.

Apple has to pay a lot of money to do that and the return on investments like that are low, not worth doing it.

Apple did add a read-only support for NTFS external drives.

If you want to add read/write support to your Mac, you can use a third party drivers to do that.

Well, but how do you explain bootcamp? does it somehow fully support NTFS?
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,478
43,405
That's pretty much my question: Why Apple doesn't support NTFS?

Because they don't have too and don't want too. They already have NTFS support built into OSX, they just don't want to bring it to another level (write access).
 

Hellhammer

Moderator emeritus
Dec 10, 2008
22,164
582
Finland
If you need to write to an NTFS partition in OSX, MacDrive does the job transparently.

MacDrive is for Windows and enables HFS+ access. You need e.g. NTFS-3G on Mac.

Because they don't have too and don't want too. They already have NTFS support built into OSX, they just don't want to bring it to another level (write access).

Actually, the write support is there as well and can be enabled via Terminal. Apple was trying to add write support when SL came but they pulled it out in the final builds.
 

BiggAW

macrumors 68030
Jun 19, 2010
2,563
176
Connecticut
From what I've heard, their built-in support is not that stable. I wonder if they ran into legal trouble so they just hid it?
 
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