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Networking changes coming in macOS 27

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Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#131

Post by joe_mamba »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #65
ryandrake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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.

Do you have a detailed source for this? I want to read more about it.

Because I noticed my old Core 2 Quad PC with Nvidia 8600GT that my parents use as their email and Facebook machine, doesn't boot with any linux newer than Kernel 6.1 even though I can get Windows 11 to boot on it.

So the myth around "Linux is great for old PCs", highly depends on what HW you have.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#132

Post by joe_mamba »

enaaem wrote: post #112
ndisn wrote: post #64

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?

>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.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#133

Post by tiffanyh »

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026192

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#134

Post by wtallis »

throw0101c wrote: post #125
wtallis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Samba 4.8 from 2018: * https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.8.0.html ("vfs_fruit") * https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...

That's when Samba gained official easy to use support for being used with Time Machine. I'm pretty sure it was possible long before then, IIRC by changing a setting on the Mac to allow selecting unsupported network volumes.

I don't recall when I stopped running netatalk on my NAS and switched to pure Samba, but I think it was before 2018.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#135

Post by nine_k »

tracker1 wrote: post #101
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that those are (mostly?) devices where they legitimately have reason to believe there are zero users. In particular, there's a pattern where someone will discover that Linux has a driver that hasn't actually worked for a long time, and nobody's complained, so then they remove it.

I'm not suggesting they keep it all... just ironic as a statement considering Linux is literally removing a bit lately... I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.

If anybody would care to keep these drivers up, it would be easy to revive them as kernel modules. It's not that Linux is going to lose an upstream interface to publish events from a bus mouse.

Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#136

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

ndisn wrote: post #64

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.

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

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#137

Post by AlexandrB »

laserlight wrote: post #114
TheJoeMan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There'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 s…

Not that it impacts your argument significantly, but for the sake of completeness, Apple employs a huge number of retail employees.

Yes. A more useful number would be how many employees are working on macOS specifically. Hard to find a definitive number for that.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#138

Post by applfanboysbgon »

Someone1234 wrote: post #130
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By the very nature of assigning development time to these antiquated features, you're assigning them away from other features, bug fixes, or requests that may have a larger user reach. Development is a finite resource, the argument here is to allocate them to hard-to-secure, outmoded, replaced, technology instead of anything future relevant. It doesn't make sense.

The person was specifically suggesting hiring extra developers for maintenance. While I'm familiar with the concept that "nine women can't birth a baby in a month", I don't think that applies so much to maintenance of old code paths. Apple makes over $100b in net profit per year, a truly unfathomable amount of money, they can afford it, and I think not only can they afford it but that it would benefit them. Even if only 1% of your users use X, for Apple that might translate to perhaps 10 million people using X, or at 0.1% 1 million. Hiring a dev to improve the experience for that many people just makes sense at scale, software is write-once reproduce-a-million-times-for-free.

I have no doubt the bean counters have drawn up every kind of spreadsheet they can imagine trying to quantify it as being not worth it, but I don't think these kinds of quality of life things can be easily quantified, because each small thing maintained might only impact a small number of users but collectively, all of these kinds of small things add up to either a system with sharp corners that constantly papercuts the user (current Apple software), or one that is so seamless that it engenders customer loyalty for decades (old Apple software). This kind of shortsighted penny-pinching is how companies become a shell of their former selves, suffering a slow death-by-MBA.

Re: Networking changes coming in macOS 27

#140

Post by Elidrake24 »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
pvtmert wrote: post #2

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…

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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