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Apple Is Releasing macOS High Sierra On September 25 (techcrunch.com)
After updating its website for the iPhone launch event, Apple has confirmed that macOS High Sierra will be released on September 25th. TechCrunch provides a brief rundown of the major changes, most of which are under the hood: The Photos app is still receiving some new features to keep it up to date with the iOS version. There are more editing tools, you can reorganize the toolbar and you can filter your photos by type. If you're a Safari user, my favorite change is that there is a new feature in the settings that lets you automatically block autoplaying videos around the web. Many websites have abused autoplaying video, it's time to stop it. And then, there's a new file system that should make your Mac snappier if you're using an SSD. Mail is compressing messages, Metal 2 should take better advantage of your GPU, Spotlight knows about your flight status, etc. The free update to macOS High Sierra will be available in the Mac App Store.
SSDs will be automatically converted to APFS, HDDs and fusion drives won't.
Blank until
Perhaps in a production environment you'll evaluate the new OS and its changes in a test environment first, and fix any issues with your applications and processes before (blindly) upgrading production systems? You know, basic common sense stuff ;-)
The fact that they didn't offer an opt out likely means there's no reason not to change over.
Well, if you're so worried, then you shouldn't upgrade ot High Sierra then on your production systems. Which is never a bad idea since the bugs on a .0 release of an OS are huge. You can hold off until .1 or .2 is released which should fix a bunch of the biggest issues.
Apple will retain support for the previous version of the OS until at least the next version of the OS is released, so you can hold off and wait for the bad news.
And Apple has nice backup tools for you too - Time Machine will be useful enough to handle a pre-upgrade backup.
there's nothing special about SSDs that makes APFS any more attractive than on a spinning disk
Yes there is, APFS is a copy-on-write filesystem. This means that you end up with a lot of fragmentation for frequently modified files. This doesn't matter for SSDs, because random reads are not much more expensive than sequential, but it can really hurt performance on spinning rust.
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People still use gpg?
People do a lot of things, regardless of your scorn and derision. Good reasons for using gpg could be listed, but fuck you.
Your choice. Based on everything I'm reading, their new file system seems to be worth the price of admission alone. Course, if you don't have an SSD then it won't do much for you.
But if that's the case, I'd recommend you spend the money to replace your storage with SSD. The performance difference is overwhelming, especially when you need to use bloat-tastic applications like Microsoft Office. (It takes a good minute or so to load from a spinning rust disk. Even on SSD it still takes 5-10 seconds.)