iOS 10.3: It will be chalking out major transitions

For all the Apple people, iOS 10.3 is rolling out today. The new update has options like find my Airpods and CarPlay improvements. If you’re looking for something major then the features in iOS 10.3 are not that major. The major shift comes for iPads and iPhone users in another way. To simply break it down, within the 10.3 iOS the company is moving supported devices to a new Apple File System (APFS). The new file system was announced last year and is designed for iPhone,  iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV.

Currently, Apple has been making use of its 31 year old Hierarchical File System (HFS) for Ios devices so far. The original HFS was designed for Macs with floppy and hard disks. This is not for modern mobile devices with solid state storage. The successor HFS+ still does not address the need of mobile devices enough. The new APFS designed by Apple is to scale across the new types of devices and take advantage of flash or SSD storage. The new one is also engineered with encryption as a primary feature. It supports features like snapshots so that restoring files on Mac or any other iOS device will be a lot easier in the future. One thing to keep in mind through this transition is that APFS is made for Apple’s modern devices.

iOS 10.3 will take a more than normal time to update

More about the APFS as it is designed to be low latency, it should improve the read and write speeds on iOS and other MAC devices. The company showed that APFS saved time on a simple file copy as compared to the HFS+ last year. Many users of the iPhone and iPad will not notice much difference after the iOS 10.3 update but for some there will be a big boost in the storage levels. Beta testers of the update did report seeing more storage available after the update. We allot this primarily to the way APFS has calculated available data.

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On the iPad and iPhone there will be little boost in storage capacity which is very unlikely to benefit you. The new file system might be more helpful in the future. This move helps Apple lay some of the benefits of the foundation to switch filly to 64 bit apps only on iOS. iOS 11 is anticipated to have this. However, you will notice that iOS 10.3 will take a bit longer to install than the other updates. We won’t see a lot of time in the installation but Apple is taking a big task here to fully switch. The silent update of millions of iOS devices will take place today and so there will be time taken longer than normal.

Image via Vanguardia