[duskwuff]

> I'm still shocked that they went with HFS+ for so long, for all its shortcomings.

At the same time, it's impressive that the basic design of HFS held up as well as it did! HFS was initially introduced in 1985, and HFS+ was a fairly conservative update to support larger volumes (and, later, metadata journaling).

> There was talk about ZFS at one point, but it never happened - maybe due to licensing.

That seems very likely. Apple's experiments with ZFS ended around 2009, right about the same time that Oracle finalized their acquisition of Sun.

[arp242]

At the time ZFS on FreeBSD came with some pretty serious caveats regarding performance and memory usage. It was pretty clearly designed for servers and not really the sort of thing designed to run on your laptop, much less iPhone. Apple probably made the right choice for technical reasons alone.

Since then ZFS has improved and machines have become faster.