It caused some hiccups for developer tools, but those were ironed out in no time flat. Nobody. Else. Noticed. It's going to be the same with the filesystem. Millions of iOS users already didn't notice. And the few edge case people who work so close to the filesystem as to notice, they'll find solutions to whatever issues they'll face.

Indeed, it's probably going to stay an option for non-boot drives forever (technology "forever", meaning until the next major platform shift or so). It's basically "done", they just need to keep compiling the modules in.

Yup, it's been silently deployed to millions of devices already, people have been hammering on it in private and public betas for months, and you are free not to upgrade to High Sierra on the first day. Same procedure as every year.

FWIW, AFP has been on the way out for a while now. Apple is moving towards standardising on SMB. The writing was on the wall that something would break eventually, and everyone who's concerned about that has had time to consider it.

Being forced to agree to what? If I don't want change, I'm not going to upgrade to High Sierra. If I'm going to upgrade, I'll take it as it comes and not pick the system apart for things I like and don't like. Ooh, I want the new foobard system process, but ergh, I don't like that libbaz moved from /usr to /System. Uuh, I like the new instant snapshot backups but ergh, I do not want that new file system. ...really?

Yep, that's pretty much the argument. Do you think any end user cared when /usr was locked down a couple of years ago?

The people who need to know (developers) have long since known that this transition is going to happen and they've had a while to prepare for it if they needed to. What good does it do to allow anyone to opt out at this point? APFS is going to happen eventually, no two ways about it. If not this year, then when is it convenient for you to do the transition? It's a lot simpler for everyone involved to get it over with and have a clear technical base, instead of complicating the possible configurations.

If you've been sticking to behaviour Apple has been telegraphing for a couple of years now, you're not going to notice a thing. If you've been homebrewing stuff close to the file system on your own disregarding all advice or you have some very specific use case... well, this is your last chance. Your option to opt out at this point is to not upgrade to High Sierra.

If you need a random Windows analogy, Microsoft forced everyone to get their shit together with regards to filename handling by including a space in the "Program Files" folder. Stuff like this happens in technology every so often.

What gives you the idea APFS is "two months old"? It's been announced in June 2016, at which point it must have been pretty darn complete already, and it's been running on millions of iOS devices for the past half year with virtually no incident whatsoever.

And nobody's forcing you to upgrade to High Sierra, unlike Microsoft's extremely aggressive Windows upgrade push. That would be a comparable point, if Apple did a virtually automatic upgrade without your consent. Including a new file system in a major system upgrade is a far cry from that.

Which end user is truly concerned about the file system? Which end user even knows what that is? As far as most users go, this is exactly the same as any other OS X update in the past: you either update or you don't; if you update, the system either works or it doesn't. It hardly matters why exactly the system may give you issues after an upgrade; in the past there have always been slight incompatibilities here and there after a major upgrade which have been ironed out by affected 3rd parties rather quickly. It makes no sense to be able to selectively opt out of those kind of system changes, and it makes little sense to opt out of this either.

If you can't run High Sierra for whatever reason right now (including concerns about the file system), stick with Sierra.

Fair enough, but not enough of a reason not to upgrade. HFS+ must go at some point, you need to get it over with eventually. It's been widely known that this change was coming for quite a while, any external tooling has had enough time to migrate where necessary.

You're right, let's stick with HFS+ then.

I think you're comparing Apples to Windows here...

*ba-dum ching!*

It's a close miss in acronyms, yet still somewhat ironic.

It's already been beta tested on all iOS devices for the past half year or so, with no widely reported incidents whatsoever. Also, some recent point macOS update already did a safe dummy conversion of everyone's disk behind the scenes, reported the results back to Apple and then discarded the changes; again, with no incidents that anyone noticed. So, uhm, yeah... I think the beta test is pretty much done at this point.

Because being forced into APFS is terrible... why exactly?

I'll agree with jon... this hasn't been an issue in practice for me in the last decade+, so is not a very convincing argument as far as I experience it. And especially when the language insists on correct whitespace, it's more likely that everyone is on the same page to begin with, and that issues with whitespace manifest immediately with a broken program rather than lingering undetected for a while.