Steven Sinofsky, Medium:
Many of us have been using the dev builds of iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra this week. I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think are some of the important advances.
And:
APFS is an entirely new file system enabling such features as clones, snapshots, encryption, 64-bit limits on file counts and sizes, crash protection, crazy performance for large file operations, and more.
And:
I’ve lived through all the Apple migrations and all the DOS/Windows migrations and not only is this among the most feature-rich releases, it is actually running right now on my Mac (and iPhone) after an in-place upgrade. I seriously sat there watching the install process thinking “this is going to take like a day to finish and it will probably fail and roll back in the middle or something”. After about 30 minutes the whole thing was complete. The amount of amazing engineering that went into both the creation and deployment of APFS is mind-blowing. And that it was done on phones, watches, and PCs is nothing short of spectacular and except for maybe the transition from FAT to FAT32, I can’t recall anything even close to this. There are a ton of features under the covers that will surface in use of Apple devices, but mostly it will just make everything better seamlessly.
There’s a lot more to this post, but I thought these words were worth highlighting. Sinofsky knows about designing, building, and delivering file systems. This is high praise indeed.
This sis a thoughtful and thorough overview.
I wonder how many partisan fools will claim this article’s somehow evidence of a sellout by someone who got bought by Apple.
The public debut of the Surface tablet might’ve been the first time I’d ever heard from or seen Steven Sinofsky. He seemed anxious about a lot of things, not the least of a brief bit of trouble with Windows 8, a product that was shoved out before it was entirely ready. I attribute that to Ballmer, the imbecile who drove away some of his company’s greatest talents, including Sinofsky himself.
This article seems to me the sort of thing that, while at Microsoft, Sinofsky’s people would have written up as a presentation to Ballmer, detailing all the ways in which Apple was lapping them while Microsoft was anchored by its preoccupation with “one Windows for everything” legacy thinking. I wonder if Ballmer’s seen it.