I'm sure there's an element of tax avoidance here. Elaborate commercial arrangements like this often do.

I checked Apple's website for the US, the Indigo 256GB model says "6-8 business days".
For Canada, where I am, the Indigo 256GB model says "August 6th".

The article you linked is from April, four months ago. Clearly the situation has changed. Neither the US nor Canada are seeing months of backlog.

I went to Apple's website and looked at the delivery time for the base macbook neo. The estimated delivery date is two days. The higher-end model, two weeks. The backlog certainly isn't months.

They've already ordered a new production run of the chips. Yes, that costs a bunch more than using the old binned chips.

That's only half of the potential problem here. I've experienced model hallucinations where the model seems to have completely fabricated ideas or conclusions which it says are included in a reddit thread. The latest version of mainstream Claude (via Perplexity) is still doing this.

That will be the direct flights from Perth to Sri Lanka, flown using stripped down Catalina flying boats. They were able to carry 3 passengers and 70kg of essential mail. The single-hop flights took up to 33 hours.

This also pokes a huge finger into the eye of Adobe. Splitting and merging PDFs is one of the main features of Acrobat for a whole class of white collar workers.

Electricity prices in Europe are around 2x what Americans pay. In Japan it is even higher. Each 9 added to uptime has a cost, and Americans have apparently decided they don't want to pay.

APFS supports compression, but it's the same compression techniques (deflate, LZVN, LZFSE) that HSF+ supports. And it seems to be a slightly higher-level approach to compression than ZFS uses, making it only mostly transparent compression. So newer techniques that ZFS leverages, like LZ4 or ZSTD, they're not an option. Compression is such a no-brainer with ZFS (particularly with how fast LZ4 and ZSTD can be) that more and more distros/operating systems are enabling it by default.

I think Apple should have converted to ZFS in the first place, APFS kind of feels like they decided to re-invent the wheel and missed out on some important stuff (like block checksums) in the process. I still think it's reasonable for them to drop HFS+ encryption support and tell people to convert the drives to APFS if they want to keep doing it, though.

What's stopping users from converting the drives from HFS+ encrypted to APFS encrypted? They have a process to do that in-place. People can keep using their existing drives, and can still have them encrypted.

Legacy systems aren't going to run macOS 28, since the last release to support Intel processors is macOS 26. This will only affect legacy archives, so, older external disks. Assuming they didn't use exFAT, but you didn't get native encryption in macOS with that either.

They're not removing encryption support, they have a modern filesystem that you can use with encryption. They're only dropping it from their deprecated 1990s-era filesystem. They're telling people to move to the modern filesystem if they want to use encrypted drives.

HFS+ was introduced with MacOS 8.1 in the late 90s. It doesn't even support dates past the year 2040. It makes sense for them to start phasing it out.

Dimensions 591 × 461 × 392 m