macOS Sequoia 15.5 deprecates support for the ancient Apple Filing Protocol dating back to the early Macintosh days
Apple’s macOS Sequoia 15.5 update deprecates support for clients using Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) to connect to servers and local computers.
Apple already informed customers via the enterprise release notes for the macOS Sequoia 15.1 update that support for Apple Filing Protocol (formerly AppleTalk Filing Protocol), or AFP, would be “removed in a future version of macOS.” Howard Oakley notes that the recent macOS Sequoia 15.5 update has deprecated AFP.
AFP is Apple’s peer-to-peer protocol from the early Macintosh days, designed for sharing files and printers with Mac computers. Sharing internal Mac volumes or NAS devices via AFP hasn’t been possible for some time, indicating support for AFP clients will be ending at some point in the future. AFP connections to servers have not been possible since macOS 11.0 Big Sur, which was released in 2020.
macOS Sequoia 15.5 deprecates support for the Apple Filing Protocol
You can, however, still use AFP to connect to older UNIX-only servers. NAS makers that still support AFP in their devices, like Synology, will likely phase out support for the protocol in favor of the ubiquitous SMB protocol that’s much more widely supported. in other words, old NAS devices that don’t use SMB 3 (Apple’s own Time Capsule included) will stop working in macOS.
“Greatest problems come with Apple’s old Time Capsules, most of which are still used with AFP, as they can only support SMB version 1, not versions 2 or 3,” Oakley writes. “If you’re still using a Time Capsule, or an old NAS that doesn’t support SMB version 3, then access to your network storage may well still be reliant on AFP,” he recommends.
AFP support ending soon will also affect enterprise users and some Mac owners who have specific needs and rely on old software. If you still use AFP, switch to Server Message Block (SMB), which is the default file-sharing protocol for accessing Windows network shares, files and clients. It’s supported across platforms, including macOS, which supports the latest SMB 3 specification out of the box.
macOS also supports other common file-sharing protocols, including Common Internet File System (CIFS) that’s still used in some NAS devices, Network File System (NFS), which is supported by Windows and commonly used for server-to-server file sharing on Linux and UNIX servers.
AFP was introduced in 1985, a year after Apple debuted the Macintosh, as its proprietary networking standard for file sharing across Macs on local area networks.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/05/20/macos-sequoia-15-5-afp-support/
Leave a Reply