While time machine used to be snappy on HDD it was build out of one of the weirdest little hacks hard links in folders. The new Time Machine might front a similar front end but under the hood its a different beast. You're having to mount snapshots as you move through time.

are you sure that is because of apfs? hdds are usually much slower, no?

you will operate it for approved uses only — the days of the 'personal' computer are over.

the future of macOS is the hospital check-in desk in Idiocracy.

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Apple's Thunderbolt FireWire 800 adapter daisy-chained with their TB2-to-TB3 adapter should work on any modern system with Thunderbolt and FireWire support, as it just presents as a bog-standard PCI FireWire card.

So worst-case, you should be able to access your old drives on a modern Mac by booting from a FireWire-compatible OS (Asahi or older macOS) on an external drive.

You used to be able to chain three adapters:

Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 FireWire 800 to FireWire 400

to plug a modern Mac into an iMac G4 in Target Disk Mode

Now you need to add another layer: virtualizing old macOS on a modern Mac

I had one plugged into the FW800 port of my Cinema Display.

Only really used it as a scratch drive for junk but it was still handy.

Not GP, but: I had replaced the battery on my M1 Max 6mo ago with an aftermarket part. On MacOS 26 that routinely gave about 5 hours of coding/browsing/active screen time (no audio or massive CPU load other than unit test runs).

Anecdotally, after updating to MacOS 27 2mo ago that time has been reduced by between a third and a half, doing the same kind of daily work on the exact same project, without major new apps installed or new always-open browser tabs.

I don’t know if it’s the OS’s fault directly or the fault of an app I use that interacts poorly with the new OS’s power management, but either one is damning. I’m not doing anything particularly weird.

I've replaced the battery earlier this year. With Sequoia I get about 14 hours of use (browsing with firefox, emails with thunderbird, youtube, spotify, apple pages and numbers). Last year when I "downgraded" to tahoe, my battery life was effectively halfed and returned to normal when I upgraded back to Sequoia. Same thing is true with GG this year.

I'll wait for Apple Supremeintelligence in macOS 29

I've gotta agree. I'm not sure what expensive storage hardware would be both relevant today and unable to migrate off CoreStorage. For example, my most expensive storage is a NAS with an iSCSI target, and it couldn't care less what blocks I write to it. If I had a CoreStorage setup on it, I could migrate the data to a new target and then reuse that space for something else. The hardware wouldn't mind, or even know, that I'd changed what's on it.

You mentioned old, obsolete Fusion drives. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else where that'd matter, so you're probably right about that. AFAIK you can reformat those to use something other than CoreStorage if you're actually stuck using those boat anchors.

CoreStorage was also used for HFS+ formatted and encrypted external storage like Time Machine backups. If you have any of those in your archive you might not be able to read them in the future.

Sidebar, but as an end user, I remain annoyed that there isn't seemingly something that's a worthy successor to fusion drives.

Like I have an Unraid box with dual NVMe (RAID1) as the "cache" drive and a bunch of spinning disks as the "array", but it's also very manual, like torrents get downloaded first to cache and then a nightly job syncs them to the array. Feels like a real missed opportunity to not be able to have this kind of config transparently managed.

I have one of those in an ageing late 2009 27" iMac running Linux. It is a Seagate ST2000DX001-1CM1, a 2TB "SSHD" which comes down to having 8 GB of NAND storage bolted on to a conventional 2TB drive. It doesn't need any special driver to do its thing so I wonder what that CoreStorage bit is supposed to be about.

AFAIK "Route 53" was a net new name for such a product?