Your Mac is slowing you down (a rant about file systems)

The video presents a detailed performance critique of Apple’s APFS file system in the context of high-intensity software development, specifically involving monorepos with large numbers of files and dependencies. The creator argues that macOS's file system is not optimized for developer-heavy tasks such as frequent directory cloning, large-scale dependency installation, and repo cleanup. Through direct comparison with Linux-based systems running XFS with VDO and LZ4 compression, he illustrates that Linux provides not only superior performance but also better storage efficiency due to its support for more advanced file-system level features like copy-on-write and sophisticated compression, which APFS fails to match.

Following the performance argument, the creator provides an educational breakdown of how file systems actually function, using a digital whiteboard to explain blocks, file metadata, and the role of decompression/compression layers like VDO in managing file storage. He emphasizes that the performance delta he observed in his benchmarks is not just a hardware issue but a fundamental architectural one, highlighting the tangible productivity costs of using an suboptimal file system for development work. The video concludes with a discussion of Rift, an experimental tool that attempts to bring better worktree support and virtualization of file operations to macOS, underscoring his frustration with the status quo and his advocacy for moving development workflows to more capable environments.