Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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> So? Millions of users do want it, judging from the huge popularity of Dropbox

Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset. Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices.

> Again, irrelevant. Lots of Mac users, and tons of pundits HAVE asked for a "new proprietary filesystem" to replace HFS+

Seem to remember that most of that conversation was of ZFS. They even got a long way into the ZFS port before abandoning. HFS+ has been getting long in the tooth for years, so a better FS is long overdue! So now we're getting APFS that explicitly doesn't checksum user data[0]! With current storage size, that's disappointing to understate it hugely.

> until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM

It's funny, if Apple had not significantly reduced the Wh of MBP batteries in the latest generation we could easily have had both. Probably a longer overall life. Teardowns show a lot of empty space around current batteries.

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/#apfs-data

>Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices.

What "odd cloud first strategy"? Cloud is just ANOTHER option, not a "first" or privileged one. To the point that Apple also includes a whole new local filesystem (in beta) with Sierra.

>Seem to remember that most of that conversation was of ZFS. They even got a long way into the ZFS port before abandoning.

Oracle bought Sun and poisoned the area with patents and threats.

>It's funny, if Apple had not significantly reduced the Wh of MBP batteries in the latest generation we could easily have had both.

No, we really couldn't. At best we'd have a 10% or so larger battery space. The impact of RAM (there whether you use 32GB or fewer for a task or not) is much larger.

To comment on Apple's "cloud first" strategy, while they do provide local file storage in their APIs, their guideline suggests avoiding creating an option for storing local files since users "expect all of their files to be available on all of their devices." (https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/i...)

> Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset.

In most cases, not because they want to, but because that's how current software works. Both Dropbox and Google Drive focus on having their own special folder that gets synced; syncing the OS desktop and documents folders is possible but only with special configuration (on both Windows and macOS).

Cloud first makes perfect sense no matter how much or how little storage you have. It prevents you from losing data if your device is lost or damaged, and if you have multiple devices it allows accessing all your data from any device. If anything, its usefulness depends more on internet connection speed.

I do think Apple's specific cloud storage offerings could be improved for large devices. Currently the highest tier of iCloud storage is 2TB, which costs $20/mo; that's only twice as large as my MacBook Pro's SSD, and fairly expensive. But it's the same price/GB as both Google Drive and Dropbox, so it can't be that much of a ripoff...

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