Yes, for several decades -- though not filesystems.
And I trivially know that software can always have bugs. I also know software has to ship at some point, and that is a different point than the "we're 100% sure it has 0 bugs" point -- which is not possible anyway.
I also don't believe in some cargo cult "optimal necessary period of testing" to make sure a given piece of software has or doesn't have bugs.
I also know that it's perfectly possible to have 10x the testing in 1/10 the time other teams/companies might take for their tests -- (e.g. by having far heavier test suites, more intelligent tests, better fuzzing, more systems to test on in your labs, more QA engineers thrown at the problem, or even formally proving your software's behavior) .
Finally, I can make ad hominem arguments too: have you wrote and deployed any filesystems before? If the domain experts designing AFS are confident to put it in use why we should trust you? Because of your scientific observations of checking how long other companies took to deploy their new filesystems and extrapolating some BS "optimal deployment time" from that?
In any case, maybe visit back this thread in 1 month? If the sky hasn't fallen for iOS 10.3 users (except, at worse, for some edge cases affecting tiny minorities/uncommon setups), maybe you'll be ready for your serving of crow?
Why should you believe me instead of the people writing APFS? You shouldn't. I'm stating my opinion on the matter. I'm allowed to disagree with them, and you're allowed to disagree with me, but "Apple thinks it's OK" is not going to convince me. If it was, then I wouldn't have formed a contrary opinion in the first place, since it's so obvious.
Further, we don't even know if the experts are confident. It's entirely possible this decision was made above them and forced on them. It's also entirely possible it wasn't, we just don't know.
In any case, if everything goes smoothly (and I hope it will), that doesn't disprove me. It could mean that you're right, or it could mean that I'm right and they got lucky. It could also mean that some people are losing data, but not visibly enough and not in large enough number to make the news.
You say "except, at worse, for some edge cases affecting tiny minorities/uncommon setups" as if that would justify Apple's approach. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm worried about here. I have no doubt it'll work for the common case. 99.9% of users will not suffer any problems. But I don't see why pushing APFS now as opposed to in a few years is worth the risk of that 0.1%.
Doesn't that make your case an empty statement that basically amounts to "you can never be too careful" (and which is always right, no matter the outcome)?
>But I don't see why pushing APFS now as opposed to in a few years is worth the risk of that 0.1%.
Because it improves lots of things with the 99.9% -- SSD utilization, better Time Machine, etc.
What other filesystems have gone from zero to being the only supported option on their platform in such a short time? ZFS took almost five years. HFS+ was supported in parallel with HFS for a long time.
"And why they'd be more than with the frequent new features and changes that Apple made/retrofitted to HFS over the years? Because they've started from scratch?"
Once again I have to wonder: have you written software before? Of course a brand new from-scratch effort will be buggier than something with a long history.