This article is a year old, but I came across it and want to highlight it anyway.
On 27 March 2017, Apple made one of its biggest corporate gambles. When it rolled out iOS 10.3 that day, the installer silently converted the storage in each iPhone and iPad to the first release of Apple’s new file system, APFS. Had a significant percentage of conversions gone wrong, Apple would have had a disaster on its hands, particularly as it didn’t admit to doing this until WWDC just over two months later, when it announced that APFS was coming to macOS 10.13 High Sierra that September.
The conversion of god knows how many iPhones and iPads to APFS, entirely silently, is one of those moments where Apple really flexed its engineering muscle. Since file systems are a bit of an archaic topic these days, I find that Apple really isn’t getting the recognition it deserves for this silent migration to APFS.
AFAIK, this filesystem has fragmentation built-in as a feature, which is why it really really sucked on spinny disks.
That’s why I stayed on El Capitan until there was a way to bypass the mandatory APFS (even on HDDs) in High Sierra and Mojave. Thank you crazybirdy for the MBR HFS patch!
More like “yet again demonstrated their total disregard for users” by not warning what was going to happen to the user’s device, and not asking for permission. So glad I don’t have to use any of their rubbish products.
It’s a pretty good result, but can you imagine the backlash if Microsoft or Google had done this?
In my opinion, the greatest achievement was probably avoiding the backlash of bastardising the end users phone without permission.
I suppose if you accept your iPhone is really Apple’s Phone kindly leased to you out of the kindness of Apple’s heart, and that the only data really at risk was Apple’s anyway, then it’s a non-issue.
I suppose the bigger question is, on a platform that trades on it’s security how did users somehow consent to this silently?
APFS on spinning disks was a catastrophe. I remember friends telling me their computers had gone to shit, then after helping them downgrade things were immediately better.
A defragmenter was supposed to have been included in APFS but idk if it was implemented