On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.
SMB1 has major security issues but even those ignored (which a lot of people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about) it's also slow as hell on MacOS
Where "new" in this case could be a NAS running Samba from 2011? Samba added official support for Time Machine much later, but I think it was possible on earlier versions with some extra steps.
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
"Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior. I can run the latest Linux kernel and still have access to an internal floppy disk drive if I wanted to, yet billion dollar companies can't seem to manage to support 10 year old stuff.
I still am sore from when I "upgraded" macOS and suddenly support for my 1080i TV was gone. Yesterday it worked fine, today it's gone. All because they can't be bothered to maintain a code path.
With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.
With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.
Just this week we've seen Linux talking about dropping support for some older hardware precisely because attacks against it were becoming easier with LLMs.
> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
It may not be the easiest surgery in the world, but you can replace the hard drive in a Time Capsule. You'll probably want to replace the power supply too after this much time
wasn't it capped at 3tb? is the drive swappable to something bigger? They discontinues them in 2018, the wifi in them is old, single disk (no raid).. better to just pick up a multidrive nas or use cloud backups. What we should be asking for is timemachine backends for cloud providers.
It's not "officially" supported, but iFixit has a guide for swapping the drive on a time capsule. I used mine with a 4TB drive for years with no trouble.
My old trusty readynas should still work i think.. probalby. Supports smd for time machine and smb3 generally. If it doesn't I might finally be pushed onto a nas that isn't discontinued.
From a risk assessment standpoint, I’ve seen my Time Machine backups corrupted much more frequently than I’ve experienced drive failure. Happened with both my Time Capsule and then my Synology RAID.
It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.
"...if you have an Apple silicon Mac and AFP support is dropped from macOS 27, that would leave you unable to upgrade without replacing your network storage."
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware.
I have colleagues who are running AFP on BSD for continuous backups on their systems, and they have to reconfigure something new to be able to continue backing up their systems.
They are compatible with netatalk though. The project split between version 2 and 3, but in recent releases they folded them back into a single thing. Current netatalk releases support all versions of AFP.
You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.
AFP and Time Capsules add attack vectors to the OS, which can be targeted even when few users actively using them. One dev could keep both basically functional, but to what end? User counts are already small, and people that aren't using them are still exposed by their mere existence.
Shrinking or removing code, in my experience, is one of the biggest single wins you can have in software development. Less to test, less to update, less to secure.
Is the code that Apple is removing support for open source? The Linux drivers could at least plausibly be picked up and used by someone who really wants to, so it doesn't seem to be a fair comparison
>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!
> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue
That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:
Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.
Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.
Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.
"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.
I am fairly confident in saying that approximately zero enterprise customers used Xcode server. It was extremely limited and targeted at small shops which didn't see the need for a proper CI setup but had an extra machine sitting around to run builds on.
People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.
Because people will fill their iClouds. An important value proposition of iCloud is that customers pay for more space than they need. Time Machine grows to fill all available space.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
> Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
Must have been a lot of years ago since Samba was introduced in Jaguar (2002), and SMB replaced AFP as the default for file sharing as of Mavericks (2013).
On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Even ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.
Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
Makes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol
Are you thinking of Time Capsule? Time Machine is fully supported and I use it every day on Tahoe.
Time Capsule has been unsupported since 2018 (last shipped 2013):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule
I think there's some population of folks that have been doing NAS TM backups over AFP, and they'll now have to switch to SMB.
They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.
Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.
SMB1 has major security issues but even those ignored (which a lot of people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about) it's also slow as hell on MacOS
> people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about
philosophically I would beg to differ about any premise assuming we can trust the castle and moat model. Even on home networks.
SMB2 came out with Vista and SMB3 was Win8 so they are not new protocols either.
That just ended up inadvertently reminding me, Windows Vista is actually almost old enough to be at the minimum legal drinking age in the US.
Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.
Time really does fly.
Where "new" in this case could be a NAS running Samba from 2011? Samba added official support for Time Machine much later, but I think it was possible on earlier versions with some extra steps.
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
"Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior. I can run the latest Linux kernel and still have access to an internal floppy disk drive if I wanted to, yet billion dollar companies can't seem to manage to support 10 year old stuff.
I still am sore from when I "upgraded" macOS and suddenly support for my 1080i TV was gone. Yesterday it worked fine, today it's gone. All because they can't be bothered to maintain a code path.
The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.
With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.
With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.
macOS Tahoe still has floppy drive support.
Just this week we've seen Linux talking about dropping support for some older hardware precisely because attacks against it were becoming easier with LLMs.
> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
Open source is better because as long as you have a single developer caring to maintain the device, it will still be there.
Bus mouse support isn't removed because it's old but because it's been broken since 2015 and nobody noticed.
Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.
It may not be the easiest surgery in the world, but you can replace the hard drive in a Time Capsule. You'll probably want to replace the power supply too after this much time
Disks can be replaced.
wasn't it capped at 3tb? is the drive swappable to something bigger? They discontinues them in 2018, the wifi in them is old, single disk (no raid).. better to just pick up a multidrive nas or use cloud backups. What we should be asking for is timemachine backends for cloud providers.
It's not "officially" supported, but iFixit has a guide for swapping the drive on a time capsule. I used mine with a 4TB drive for years with no trouble.
Sure, but still just a single drive.
My old trusty readynas should still work i think.. probalby. Supports smd for time machine and smb3 generally. If it doesn't I might finally be pushed onto a nas that isn't discontinued.
I had an early ReadyNAS that was a champ for years. I wonder if the fact that it was based on SPARC had anything to do with its longevity.
From a risk assessment standpoint, I’ve seen my Time Machine backups corrupted much more frequently than I’ve experienced drive failure. Happened with both my Time Capsule and then my Synology RAID.
It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.
Why is it that Apple products attract blogspam titles?
> Networking changes coming in macOS 27
And yet:
> This year, with just over six weeks to go before that first beta of macOS 27, we already have two warnings of what might be coming.
> It repeated those warnings with macOS Sequoia 15.5, but still hasn’t confirmed when AFP will be lost.
> Although Apple carefully avoids being too specific, it warns that this change could come “as early as the next major software release”,
"...if you have an Apple silicon Mac and AFP support is dropped from macOS 27, that would leave you unable to upgrade without replacing your network storage."
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware.
I have colleagues who are running AFP on BSD for continuous backups on their systems, and they have to reconfigure something new to be able to continue backing up their systems.
I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk
Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.
Nah, classic Macintosh OSes aren't compatible with modern AFP.
They are compatible with netatalk though. The project split between version 2 and 3, but in recent releases they folded them back into a single thing. Current netatalk releases support all versions of AFP.
> That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware
Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.
I believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
Can't they hire an extra dev per abandoned project to not abandon it?
You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.
AFP and Time Capsules add attack vectors to the OS, which can be targeted even when few users actively using them. One dev could keep both basically functional, but to what end? User counts are already small, and people that aren't using them are still exposed by their mere existence.
Shrinking or removing code, in my experience, is one of the biggest single wins you can have in software development. Less to test, less to update, less to secure.
> You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.
cf Linux removing old network drivers this week for the same reason (without the hand-wringing that this Apple announcement is getting!)
Is the code that Apple is removing support for open source? The Linux drivers could at least plausibly be picked up and used by someone who really wants to, so it doesn't seem to be a fair comparison
>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!
> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue
That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:
But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.
I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested).
How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?
I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
Still true for extended attributes, which Finder and Spotlight love to query.
...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
Wouldn't the TimeCapsules still work over wired connections, just like any other hard drive, even if the networking AFP protocol support is dropped?
No, afp is application layer. It doesn't matter how the device is connected at layers 1 or 2.
You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.
Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.
Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
Hence "next". And by local I meant directly connected drives.
I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.
"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.
I am fairly confident in saying that approximately zero enterprise customers used Xcode server. It was extremely limited and targeted at small shops which didn't see the need for a proper CI setup but had an extra machine sitting around to run builds on.
They switched the default protocol from AFP to SMB a long time ago.
They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.
The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience
People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.
Because people will fill their iClouds. An important value proposition of iCloud is that customers pay for more space than they need. Time Machine grows to fill all available space.
As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.
I like having control over my backups.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
https://github.com/lookfirst/ResticScheduler
The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
For me it was a key DB file inside the Photo library which Time Machine omitted from all backups and prevented me from restoring the library. Not fun.
Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.
also known as "prescient"
> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
> Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
Does the mac still lack a SMB/CIFS browser?
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
macOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.
Must have been a lot of years ago since Samba was introduced in Jaguar (2002), and SMB replaced AFP as the default for file sharing as of Mavericks (2013).
It's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.