APFS was designed to correct issues with which earlier Apple filesystem?

• A. NTFS
• B. HFS+
• C. ext4
• D. FAT32

Answer: (B)

APFS was designed to fix the limitations of the previous Apple filesystem used on macOS and other Apple devices. That predecessor, HFS+, struggled with performance and reliability on modern storage, especially SSDs, and lacked features that matter today—such as robust metadata integrity, efficient cloning, snapshots, space sharing, and native strong encryption. APFS uses copy-on-write metadata to protect against corruption during updates, adds space-efficient clones and snapshots, and optimizes for solid-state storage while improving encryption support and overall metadata performance. These changes address the practical needs of contemporary devices and workloads, making APFS a more reliable and capable filesystem for Apple ecosystems. The other options come from Windows or Linux ecosystems (NTFS and ext4) or are older cross-platform formats (FAT32) and are not the Apple predecessor APFS was designed to replace.