[gnu8]

This is why it was really disappointing that Apple had to abandon ZFS. ZFS is one of the best file systems available and because Oracle owns it it is virtually unusable in most contexts.

I wonder if Apple can afford to buy out Oracle at this point, take ZFS and wind up the useless parts.

[cowsandmilk]

Apple abandoned ZFS when Steve Jobs was still alive. Larry Ellison has frequently described Steve Jobs as one of his best friends whom he frequently went on walks with. The idea that Steve could not have gotten Larry to license ZFS seems crazy to me.

[tw04]

ZFS was in the middle of a lawsuit at the time. Larry may have been willing to license it, but I doubt he was willing to indemnify.

[rsynnott]

I'm sure the lawyers were not too keen to depend on a personal relationship to smooth over their dealings with Oracle, a company known in large part for suing people in novel ways.

[umanwizard]

Did Jobs really know/care about technical details like what filesystem OS X used?

[eli]

At one point it was a significant bullet point in the list of features being added to OS X Server. It was a big deal. I'm sure he was aware of it.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-announces-zfs-on-snow-leo...

[dlitz]

I used OS X Server in 2008. It had major quality issues that seemed to only get worse with subsequent releases. Several advertised features accessible from the UI didn't work or straight-up broke things. I doubt Jobs paid much attention to it.

[rdancer]

Why would you think he wasn't? Many anecdotes mention him micromanaging minute details, and many of the things he mentions in keynotes are highly technical as well as low-level.

[umanwizard]

I didn't have a prior belief either way; I was asking out of genuine curiosity.

[KirinDave]

I mean, there is http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page and FreeBSD has been proving the implementations reliability for some time now.

Apple could adopt it. They don't. That's probably because the desktop OS is on life support, and there are indications Apple wants to abandon it in favor of a migration to a wholly iOS model.

[snowwrestler]

And what file system does iOS use? I believe it is HFS+. So, if there was a compelling reason to switch from HFS+ to ZFS, it would apply equally to an iOS-only future at Apple. (Although I see no indications of such a future.)

I think it is more likely that:

a) Apple is working on their own new filesystem, optimized for their use. A company that invests in their own chip designs can certainly invest in their own filesystem.

OR

b) Apple feels that HFS+ is not actually holding them back, and plans to stick with it for the foreseeable future.

[lobster_johnson]

As I understand it, ZFS would be too heavyweight for iOS. Its memory usage [1] is much higher than most other file systems.

iOS uses HFS+ in case sensitive mode ("HSFX"), by the way.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

[empthought]

There are no such indications.

[KirinDave]

The derelict OS, continued lockdown of OSX, UI convergence, iPad Pro as a "laptop replacement", the OSX Store having an even worse developer experience than the iOS store, the OSX store letting a cert expire.

Oh, and the MacBook line is essentially stagnant as a product line. Basically Apple let's Intel redo the MacBook guts while its hardware teams are hard at work on improving their own architecture for the iPad Pro, which is very clearly a vision of computing that is more like iOS.

[empthought]

> The derelict OS

What? It has a major release every year. Arguably that's too often.

> continued lockdown of OS X

An indication of long-term investment in OS X. If they wanted to move people to iOS, they wouldn't bother.

> UI convergence, iPad Pro as a "laptop replacement"

There is almost no UI convergence. Do you even use an OS X system? The iPad Pro is only a potential laptop replacement for certain niches; for non-power-users it's more of an iPad replacement.

> the OSX Store having an even worse developer experience than the iOS store

Has nothing to do with the operating system.

> the OSX store letting a cert expire.

Has nothing to do with the operating system.

> Oh, and the MacBook line is essentially stagnant as a product line. Basically Apple let's Intel redo the MacBook guts while its hardware teams are hard at work on improving their own architecture for the iPad Pro, which is very clearly a vision of computing that is more like iOS.

Notebooks as a whole are stagnant. Apple manages to make much more money, on essentially the same hardware as everyone else, simply by investing in their brand by spending a little more time on industrial design and the operating system. They would be fools to change anything about that arrangement.

[KirinDave]

Excuses, excuses, and fine-grained sub-classifications. OSX feels bad and stale. The store breaking only exacerbated this.

Oh, and El Capitan's fucked dev experience?

> There is almost no UI convergence.

"Almost" being notification center which is really important and interacted with regularly, I guess.

[empthought]

So you don't have any actual facts to back up your earlier statement. Meanwhile in reality:

https://medium.com/backchannel/exclusive-why-apple-is-still-...

"“From the ergonomic standpoint we have studied this pretty extensively and we believe that on a desktop scenario where you have a fixed keyboard, having to reach up to do touch interfaces is uncomfortable,” says Schiller. “iOS from its start has been designed as a multi-touch experience — you don’t have the things you have in a mouse-driven interface, like a cursor to move around, or teeny little ‘close’ boxes that you can’t hit with your finger. The Mac OS has been designed from day one for an indirect pointing mechanism. These two worlds are different on purpose, and that’s a good thing — we can optimize around the best experience for each and not try to mesh them together into a least-common-denominator experience." -- Phil Schiller

http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/tim-cook-apple...

"We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,” said Cook. “Because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways." -- Tim Cook

You're unable to develop software using OS X. Other people do not seem to be so impaired. If you think Notification Center is an example of important UI convergence, it doesn't take much imagination to come up with possible explanations.

[devNoise]

I think your right that Apple is more focused on iOS. I can't figure out how Apple expects developers to create apps for iOS if OS X goes away.

[KirinDave]

If they can make a passable XCode experience on the iPad Pro, it'll work. People write surface apps on surface devices.

[freck]

Oracle's ownership was not the problem (it was actually Sun's at the time Apple was working on it); NetApp's patent lawsuit was.

[ScottBurson]

I think ZFS would still need some work to be a good consumer filesystem. Most notably, they would have to remove the restriction that you can't expand a pool by adding devices -- the way you have to do it now (swap in a larger device for one existing device, resilver, and repeat) is just a non-starter.