#applesmb

You ever have one of those moments — like in Apocalypse Now — where Kurtz is sittin’ there in the dark talkin’ about the “diamond bullet” hittin’ him right in the forehead?

Yeah. That’s me the first time I realized Apple — freakin’ Apple — can’t round‑trip a filename between two Macs without turnin’ it into a witness‑protection‑program alias.

I’m sittin’ there like:

“Wait… WAIT. These guys made a whole newspaper ad in ’95 clownin’ Microsoft for 8.3 filenames… and now they’re the ones coughin’ up BJUKFP~5 like it’s 1993 and I’m installin’ Doom off floppy disks?”

What the hell happened?

Apple used to be the enlightened monks of filenames.

They were floatin’ above the rest of us like:

“Ohhh, look at us, we’ve had long filenames since 1984. We’re artists. We’re visionaries. We’re the future.”

Yeah?

Well the future apparently involves hashing your perfectly normal filename into a license plate from a stolen Honda Civic.

I rename a file on my Mac, send it to a NAS, bring it back, and suddenly it’s like:

“Congratulations, your file is now called QZRTD~7. Enjoy.”

What is this, a CAPTCHA?

And the best part — the BEST part — is Apple acts like this is totally normal.

No warning. No pop‑up. No “Hey buddy, SMB doesn’t like your cute little vertical bar character.”

Nothing.

Just silently turns your file into a freakin’ Scrabble hand.

And then you go back to AFP and it’s like:

“Oh yeah, we tried to reconstruct your filename, but uh… here’s a random bracketed character instead. Good luck.”

It’s like watching two drunk guys try to describe a license plate to each other.

And that’s when it hits you — the diamond bullet — right in the forehead:

Apple didn’t fix filenames.

They just hid the problem behind a velvet curtain for 30 years.

And now that they switched to SMB, the curtain’s gone and you’re lookin’ at the machinery like:

“Oh my god… this whole time it was just duct tape and a DOS compatibility layer.”

I swear, if Steve Jobs saw this, he’d walk back into the office, barefoot, turtleneck on, and go: