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AFP client to be removed

mikeboss

mikeboss

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 13, 2009
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it's not clear if this will happen with macOS 16.

www.heise.de

Discontinued and soon to disappear: Apple's network protocol AFP

SMB has long since replaced AFP in macOS, but users were still able to use the AFP client for network connections. This will soon come to an end.
www.heise.de www.heise.de

mg-91b5fcc7-w1827-w828-w1300.jpg
 
mikeboss said:
the client is going to be removed. AFP server is gone since quite some time already...
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Ok.. well, AFP has been deprecated for nearly a decade. Big Sur removed AFP sharing. This news site only news site referring to AFP client removal but does not site its source except obscure reference to Apple "first announced this step in advance versions of macOS 15.5 Sequoia." (15.5 release notes? tech notes?) I guess we'll find out when the first betas of macOS 16 roll out this summer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Bigwaff said:
Ok.. well, AFP has been deprecated for nearly a decade. Big Sur removed AFP sharing. This news site only news site referring to AFP client removal but does not site its source except obscure reference to Apple "first announced this step in advance versions of macOS 15.5 Sequoia." (15.5 release notes? tech notes?) I guess we'll find out when the first betas of macOS 16 roll out this summer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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today we got the official announcement from Apple:

What's new for enterprise in macOS Sequoia - Apple Support

Learn about the enterprise content that Apple has released for macOS Sequoia.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
 
So that I am understanding this correctly, does this just mean that future macOS versions will not be able to connect to older Macs running an AFP server (like a Mac running 10.4 Tiger or something)? Or am I misunderstanding this?

If that's the case, I guess we will all maybe need another bridge Mac in the mix for some of those older Macs to connect to on both ends, with AFP and SMB.
 
Slix said:
If that's the case, I guess we will all maybe need another bridge Mac in the mix for some of those older Macs to connect to on both ends, with AFP and SMB.
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Which you are really going to want. Because Tiger's implementation of the SMB protocol is god-awful.
 
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eyoungren said:
Which you are really going to want. Because Tiger's implementation of the SMB protocol is god-awful.
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I've been using my 10.6 Snow Leopard Server Mac Mini has my go-between Mac for a while now, it seems to work well for things like this. I guess we'll see how it works in the future.
 
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AirPort Disk functionality (which I believe the Time Capsule piggybacked on) only supported AFP. I really doubt Apple's going to re-engineer the software at this point, so those will likely be EOL for any sort of network disk functionality once support is removed from macOS.
 
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DankeBrutus said:
From what I have heard and experienced the current implementation of SMB isn't great either.
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Yeah, it's not. But it's better than it was during the PowerPC era. Back then if you wanted to properly connect to Windows servers you either needed DAVE or you needed to shut off the majority of the server's security protocols in order to get a Tiger Mac to connect. Then you had to worry about Finder issues with copying, deleting and saving files.

Not such a worry in the less than 20 employee company I worked for, but a major concern if you were a large business.
 
The biggest problem for me will be all the thousands of legacy folders and files we have that have characters in the name that SMB doesn't support, leaving completely gibberish names without even a file extension. We'll have to keep at least one older mac around so we know what the file even is, or probably the more proper solution is to run Better Finder Rename and letting it rename them.
 
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eyoungren said:
Yeah, it's not. But it's better than it was during the PowerPC era. Back then if you wanted to properly connect to Windows servers you either needed DAVE or you needed to shut off the majority of the server's security protocols in order to get a Tiger Mac to connect. Then you had to worry about Finder issues with copying, deleting and saving files.
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It's funny you mention having to disable security protocols for SMB back then because I have had that experience with NFS on Sequoia.
I have a few NFS shares exported on my LAN. On my Linux machines they connect just fine, NFS is all set up and shares are mounted at boot. It's wonderful.
On macOS? An entirely different story. Firstly, having to configure /etc/fstab with vi? Why? I just pinned the shares in Finder with the nfs://... link. Secondly, no matter what ports, services, or IPs I opened up on UFW my Macs simply would not connect to any NFS share behind it. I had to disable UFW to connect to the shares.
 
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Just another way for Apple to force migration to newer hardware, even when older Mac being used as file servers work great now it won’t be able to connect to it without using a less secure SMB. :rolleyes:
 
JosephAW said:
Just another way for Apple to force migration to newer hardware, even when older Mac being used as file servers work great now it won’t be able to connect to it without using a less secure SMB. :rolleyes:
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I wish Apple kept updating the Time Capsule. Obviously in the world of self-hosted Plex servers and services the wants of home server people have expanded but the Time Capsule is still a capable file server because, frankly, file servers don't need too much oomph.
 
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