hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate

132

zzdw about 3 hours ago 43 commentsRead Article on lapcatsoftware.com

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Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

StilesCrisis•about 1 hour ago

"Despite giving Apple 100% reliable steps to reproduce, they asked me if the issue still occurred in the latest beta, and if it does, then I should submit an iOS sysdiagnose." No one looked at your repro steps, and no one researched your bug. They're just looking to cull the bug list. If you don't respond immediately, your radar is closed.

boredatoms•about 1 hour ago

Gotta pump those metrics for the PMs

natbro•12 minutes ago

smells more like an auto-respond or ai-respond to extant issues. we will farm out reproducing this bug to the OG, both to save us time and because if they don't complain it must be a signal this isn't important anymore.

DrJokepu•about 2 hours ago

> To conclude, I don’t understand why hdiutil needs to be deprecated when the same functionality will live on in diskutil. For some reason, Apple seems intent on breaking longtime workflows and scripts.

Brother, it’s Apple. Any backwards compatibility is purely incidental.

II2II•about 1 hour ago

Given Apple's reputation as of late, I was mildly shocked to learn that I could connect a SATA optical drive to my Mac with a USB-SATA bridge, right click on an image in the Finder, and tell it to burn the image to DVD. This is under the latest beta of macOS.

You can call it incidental if you want, but it generally takes some effort to ensure everything works. That's especially true when you consider how much has changed since optical drives were common.

As for other forms of disk images, such as software distribution, those are still a common thing in macOS.

cosmic_cheese•20 minutes ago

iPods and AirPort Express units from 20+ years ago still work in modern macOS too. Things have been shuffled around some (iPods are now managed with the Finder instead of in Music.app) but they still work.

I would agree with the idea that they're not bothered about breaking workflows, particularly those involving command line tools, but hardware compatibility isn't nearly as bad as the internet might have one think. Source compatibility isn't all that bad either, many ancient Objective-C/AppKit codebases can be made to compile in an evening. It's mainly binaries that break.

philistine•16 minutes ago

Yeah, Apple is very weary of breaking user functionality. They'll just break your app's ability to run.

detourdog•about 2 hours ago

Diskutil has been around for over a decade and slowly getting features that hdiutil was missing.

Things change but this is hardly some sort of sudden rug pull by Apple.

steve_adams_86•about 2 hours ago

Haven’t they actually done a relatively good job in this regard in many ways? I can still use my 12 year old MacBook Air. It’s not super current and not all apps work, but it’s actually still a decent Apple experience. Same with our old iPad. They kept it updated way longer than I expected.

bigyabai•about 2 hours ago

> It’s not super current and not all apps work

That's an enormous concession, relative to Windows or Linux.

mschuster91•about 2 hours ago

> That's an enormous concession, relative to Windows or Linux.

Windows yes, but Linux... no, at least if it's open source.

Closed source apps that compile fully static, these tend to be stable and Just Run in my experience... but open source apps? Good luck trying to bring these to even compile 10 years afterwards without going through an insane dance with Docker...

select1•about 2 hours ago

On Linux, there aren't 'apps' that normal people want. Basic things like 'functional 1080p/4k Netflix' and 'commercial software' aren't really a thing.

pudgywalsh•about 2 hours ago

> Haven’t they actually done a relatively good job in this regard in many ways?

No.

Can't run current versions of any apps including Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

Meanwhile the hardware is perfectly fine and could run a supported version of Windows or Linux.

Call me when Apple has a "LTSC" version of their OS. (Spoiler: they won't, ever. Supporting Apple in an enterprise is nothing short of a nightmare.)

cosmic_cheese•14 minutes ago

This is partially on third-party devs' shoulders. There are community-maintained backports of Chromium and Mozilla for old versions of macOS, which means it isn't strictly impossible, but Google and Mozilla just don't bother and cut off compatibility earlier there than on other platforms.

It's even possible to build Mac apps to run on everything from OS X 10.4 (2005) through macOS 27 (2026) across PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon in a single binary. See XLD[0], which does exactly that.

[0]: https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

amelius•30 minutes ago

Consumer electronics, what do you expect ...

varispeed•41 minutes ago

Any reason to "upgrade"? I am still on Sonoma and don't see a point updating the system.

nrabulinski•about 3 hours ago

Given xip has been deprecated for a long time now, yet still is the format Xcode is distributed in, I highly doubt hidutil will ever disappear from macOS. Apple just won’t really update it anymore, just like they haven’t changed xip (not like hidutil has seen any significant changes, but still)

bbatsell•about 3 hours ago

Agreed. seatbelt/sandbox-exec has been “deprecated” for many, many years yet it still underlies all of the system’s sandboxing and Claude et al. use it for their own sandboxes. (And so do I — writing seatbelt rules is the only chance I get to write lisp-flavored anything these days.)

sunshowers•about 1 hour ago

This is only tangentially related, but libuv and mio's Windows implementations use the undocumented AFD readiness-based poll interface [1], since there isn't a documented readiness-based interface on Windows. The undocumented interface is now effectively stable since, among other reasons, Microsoft uses Tokio in some of its products.

[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/master/src/sys/windows/...

dieulot•about 2 hours ago

Similarly, launchctl has long-deprecated subcommands. I initially tried using the new subcommands, ran into issues, and told myself I should have known the “deprecated” ones were the way to go, now and forward.

binaryturtle•about 1 hour ago

So I guess ram disks are deprecated too? (AFAIR hdiutil was the only way to create them)

plorkyeran•35 minutes ago

This is one of the things the new `diskutil image` subcommand mentioned in the article supports: `diskutil image attach ram://${size}m`.

jstsch•about 3 hours ago

Was the error visible somewhere through Console.app? This is a major annoyance for me with Cocoa/AppKit apps that basically have terminal usage secondary.

lukeify•about 1 hour ago

> Yes, Apple requested an iOS sysdiagnose for a macOS bug

Dealing with Apple's labyrinth maze that is Radar/Feedback is an exhausting nightmare, honestly. It leaves users intentionally blind as to the state of any FB's they raise, and (presumably unintentionally) gaslights users who attempt to improve the state of Apple's declining software products by repeatedly asking them for spindumps/sysdiagnoses that will subsequently either be ignored (sometimes for years), or re-requested in a future release.

I gave up attempting to engage with it years ago. Apple don't want technical feedback unless it's P1 security.

kibwen•24 minutes ago

It's just not worth it for individuals to volunteer their time for the benefit of the world's most valuable company.

delduca•about 1 hour ago

Rosseta too

user19282•about 2 hours ago

I read this as hidutil and had a mini heart attack.

pudgywalsh•about 2 hours ago

Pepperidge Farm remembers when they removed the Telnet client (and ntpd, and a half dozen other things) from the OS and didn't warn anyone.

select1•about 2 hours ago

Totally normal. March of progress. Old stuff goes away.

KlayLay•about 1 hour ago

diskutil is for disks (e.g., volumes) while hdiutil is for disk images ("file system as a file"). They're not two versions of the same thing, so it doesn't make sense to dub deprecating hdiutil as "progress."

Klonoar•18 minutes ago

The former has been taking the latter’s job for years now.

Nobody really cares that they were originally for separate things.

doodlesdev•about 1 hour ago

If diskutil actually did everything OP looks for that was available in hdiutil, that's correct. If you read the post though, you'll see that diskutil has many limitations compared to its predecessor.

applfanboysbgon•12 minutes ago

Progress is when we make things worse just because we can.

Username relevant as always.