[skyebook]

I believe when they flipped the switch to default to SMB it was actually to SMB 3 in 10.10.

Anecdotally, I'd always found AFP in the Tiger and Leopard days to be faster than whichever version of SMB support was included at the time. Now I use the default SMB3 and it seems that 802.11ac and gigabit are bottlenecks (of course its 10 years later in the times of SSD's as well)

[trynewideas]

Apple deprecated AFP and switched to SMB2 by default in Mavericks/10.9 (https://www.apple.com/media/us/osx/2013/docs/OSX_Mavericks_C...). AFP was used only for Time Machines and connections to older Macs.

And it wasn't just anecdotally faster; I worked for a storage company specializing in Mac workflows and AFP was empirically several times faster, especially on 1GbE and 10GbE networks. This was in part due to Apple ditching Samba in Lion/10.7 (http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_10...) over GPL concerns and replaced it with their own shitty, incomplete implementation, which they didn't get up to Samba's standards until 10.10.

I remember this being excruciating since customers had to either buy a third-party SMB implementation like DAVE to get any value out of 10GbE connections, or hope that the applications they wanted to use over the network supported AFP.