From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.misc



macOS 27 Golden Gate Pulls the Plug on Apple’s Beloved Time Capsule
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The removal of legacy AFP support officially ends an era for Apple’s
vintage router family.

With macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple is drawing some hard lines in the
sand for its legacy. Not only does this year’s big release close the
book on the Intel Generation, but it’s also marking the official end
of a device that was once the pinnacle of a now-forgotten Apple
product family: the AirPort Time Capsule.

<snip long history of the Time Capsule>

Enter macOS 27: The Final Blow to AFP
That era will now be coming to an end for anyone upgrading to
macOS 27 Golden Gate this year, which is removing the Apple Filing
Protocol (AFP) — a key legacy protocol the AirPort Time Capsule
relied on to do its thing.

As the name suggests, AFP was a proprietary network protocol that
Apple invented in the late eighties, when Unix and NetWare servers
roamed the earth. As with its foray into wireless technologies, AFP
was Apple’s attempt to have a foothold in the networking space at a
time when it was building dedicated Mac server hardware in the form
of the Xserve lineup.

Those ambitions slowly died on the vine as Microsoft became more
dominant in the networking space. Apple built its last Xserve in
2010, and discontinued “server” configurations of the Mac mini in
2014. The Mac OS X Server (later macOS Server) hung on for a few
more years, but it was gradually deprecated until Apple finally
killed it off in 2022.

AFP followed a similar slow burn into obscurity. In 2013,
OS X 10.9 Mavericks switched the default file-sharing protocol to
Microsoft’s more universal SMB (Server Message Block) protocol,
meaning most folks were no longer using it by default. In 2020,
macOS 11 Big Sur took away the AFP server capabilities, meaning
all file sharing from modern Macs was left to run strictly over
SMB, and macOS 15 Sequoia formally “deprecated” AFP, starting the
clock on its eventual removal.

With macOS 27 Golden Gate, that clock has run out. As Apple warned
us in last year’s Tahoe release, AFP is gone in the first developer
beta — and it won’t be coming back. This means that network Time
Machine backups from macOS 27 will require a server that supports
the latest SMB protocols.

There’s some good news for DIYers who want to hack their Time
Capsules back into action. In April, the folks at AppleInsider
shared news of TimeCapsuleSMB, a GitHub project that hopes to
retrofit the Time Capsule with modern SMB support. Technically,
the Time Capsule also supports a relatively ancient version of SMB,
known as SMBv1, but that has massive security issues and has been
disabled by default on macOS for years. However, it gives the
GitHub crew a theoretical hook, as it only needs to upgrade the
existing SMB stack, which is simpler than introducing an entirely
new protocol. Still, it’s an ambitious undertaking, considering
that Apple has never released the source code.

<https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMBhttps://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB>


For most folks still relying on an AirPort Time Capsule, it’s likely
time to cut bait and upgrade to something else. Having been released
in 2013 and last sold in 2018, it’s fair to say the Time Capsule has
already served anyone who has owned it quite well.



<https://www.idropnews.com/news/macos-27-kills-airport-time-capsule/265286/>





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