hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
lapcatsoftware.comGiven 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)
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.)
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/...
Windows has a stable syscall ABI today officially, for supporting down-level containers:
> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...
> Decoupling the User/Kernel boundary in Windows is a monumental task and highly non-trivial, however, we have been working hard to stabilize this boundary across all of Windows to provide our customers the flexibility to run down-level containers. Starting with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 we are enabling the ability to run process-isolated WS2022 containers on Windows 11 hosts.
libuv does all sorts of shenanigans, like using the undocumented fields in STARTUPINFOW the CRT uses to pass file descriptors to processes inheriting handles so that you can open whatever file descriptor you need in your children processes like in POSIX
But Microsoft kind of expects this crap and will support it until the end of time; Apple can't give a crap until and will readily break programs even when they use legal APIs
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.
I like how the $4.5T company can’t pay for the 100 engineering hours a year to maintain this, or just fork over the Claude tokens to do it, while they keep telling us how productive AI is making them (which, to be clear, has indeed made me a lot more productive).
Does it need to though? After so many years I can assume the program is complete as in there aren't any bugs left that need fixing and there aren't any new features needed in the scope of the program
"can't" here isn't really the right word. They obviously could, in the same way that a company making $4.5 million could.
But there's a near infinite number of things they could do; they're constantly choosing which to actually do.
AI has made my life more productive and I could use the time it's saved me to go for a run, but here I am.
> AI has made my life more productive and I could use the time it's saved me to go for a run, but here I am.
So in reality, AI has not changed your productivity at all, because you are using the extra time you saved to post on HN
That was the joke, yes.
Whose to say that more HN posting isn't more productive? /s
Refusing to maintain something isn't some sort of 'poorness signal', it's a wealth-neutral choice that could have any number of contextual drivers. Apple may not be eligible for 'too poor to maintain it' but invalidating one potential motivation leaves many others unaddressed and offers no useful argument against removal.
Not working in a $4.5T company but often I found that people rather don’t _want_ to maintain the code than can’t
The greed is as endless as the earth is old.
Is it also not greedy to demand virtually unlimited support from companies? Why should Apple spend money on this random utility that virtually nobody uses?
Because I use it and pay them money for that?
Yes, you've made the right call trusting Apple with this, the company with famously-good backwards-compatibility and long-lived support for third-party software /s
So I guess ram disks are deprecated too? (AFAIR hdiutil was the only way to create them)
This is one of the things the new `diskutil image` subcommand mentioned in the article supports: `diskutil image attach ram://${size}m`.
RAM itself is deprecated. All the new systems have about one fourth of the RAM they had two years ago.
Something about some insider B2B deals for data centers, blah blah blah.
I expect a flood of cheap RAM, SSDs, and GPUs to hit the scene within about two years, after the AI boom goes bust.
> 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.
We’ve received many an email urging us to reach out to Apple via Feedback Assistant. We of course have, multiple times. We’re told that we will strike gold if we just resubmit a bug report to some other part of the company. Yet, the APIs are still broken, and break again with new releases. Sometimes they get back to us to clarify something, often they do not. Some things have been fixed, most have not.
I understand the realities of sifting through millions of reports, but the futility of being told to report harder and fighting with UX breaking bugs does not inspire confidence in Apple’s software teams. The bugs I am referring to are interactions where an app cannot update automatically or manually if you set this one flag, or your socket never fires any callbacks if you set the one cool flag, or this view mostly always fires a callback on dismissal, but not always. Some things we can work around, with varying degrees of effort. Some we cannot. It is very clear to me that nobody tests the things we run into, for I cannot imagine how anyone would let this stuff pass into production otherwise.
It's just not worth it for individuals to volunteer their time for the benefit of the world's most valuable company.
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.
"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.
Gotta pump those metrics for the PMs
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.
This pattern predates AI. It's just something they do with all idle radars when new OS releases launch. The fact that it was bucketed under iOS means they did literally zero investigation.
Sometimes I almost believe there are whole sections of the Apple Ring building where the employees are so immersed in IOS that they're unaware MacOS exists.
I understand that your comment is meant as a joke but... all the people working on iOS use macOS daily. On their Mac. That they work on.
I read this as hidutil and had a mini heart attack.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, Apple is very weary of breaking user functionality. They'll just break your app's ability to run.
Frankly, I don't think it's practical to expect operating systems to continue to run binaries perfectly in perpetuity. It's an enormously burdensome expectation that holds development of the platform hostage.
Usually all it takes to keep one's software running on macOS is compiling against the latest SDK once every ~5 years. Depending on the nature of the app, source changes often aren't even required. As a dev I don't think that's too much to ask.
> Frankly, I don't think it's practical to expect operating systems to continue to run binaries perfectly in perpetuity.
A lot of that is going to depend upon perspective.
Take something that is coming up: Apple has mentioned that Intel application support is going to end in the next release, or about 8 years after the introduction of the M1. Eight years may sound like a good run, but there are all sorts of edge cases: software that doesn't receive updates because the publisher is no longer in business, or software developers who are providing updates under a disagreeably different business model (ahem, subscriptions). Some software may have been released Intel only after the release of the M1, simply because the developer wasn't going to test a new architecture immediately after its release.
I'm not going to pretend that I know how much software that affects, because there was a 12 or 13 year gap in my use of Macintosh. Something I did notice after my return to macOS was the absence of software due to earlier changes in the platform. An more exotic example is F-Script[1]. Not only is the project gone, but the change in the security model pretty much ensures that nothing like it will ever exist again. A more common example will be games, where only a select few will receive updates a couple of years after its release.
x86 translation will be slimmed down but remain for compatibility with the Game Porting Toolkit[0]. Their reasoning is likely that they want to limit the set of libraries that they ship x86 slices for as much as reasonably possible because each supported architecture multiplies surface area across the entire system.
It’s also notable that virtualizing macOS on macOS has now been officially supported and easy for several years, so it’s possible to just spin up a VM running an old version of macOS for software that requires Rosetta. Some kind of containerization probably isn’t a bad idea in that situation anyway, as software that’s gone so long without updates likely carries a number of vulnerabilities.
And on that note, the highly permissive state of desktop OS security as it had been for the 2000s and 2010s was never going to last. It’s been proven repeatedly that third party software must be treated adversarially, both because the big guys like Adobe can’t be trusted to keep their fingers to themselves and the little guys and FOSS projects sometimes fall victim to supply chain attacks. The OS must try to limit the blast radius where possible.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
> It’s also notable that virtualizing macOS on macOS has now been officially supported
FWIW, limited to two macOS VMs per host unless you hack it.
Apple unfortunately takes the opportunity of you compiling against the newest SDK to change and break all kinds of undocumented behaviors your app has been depending on, which almost always negotiates source code changes. If you’re lucky you’ll actually notice the changes; more than likely your app just appears more unstable and buggy to your users.
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.
Your comment is irrelevant because your MBA left support eras ago and is riddled with bugs and security vulnerabilities at this point.
Apple also does a poor job at long term software support or granting users the ability to run Linux, especially the newer the systems get.
The comment is a question; I’m not sure why one answer or another would make it irrelevant.
> It’s not super current and not all apps work
That's an enormous concession, relative to Windows or Linux.
> 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...
While that's absolutely correct, you're arguing with a strawman. Take a look at the original quote:
The point is I can run the latest Linux distributions and software on a 12 year old computer with no issues whatsoever.> 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.You might be able to do that in Windows, if you bypass TPM and CPU requirements or if you stay with Windows 10 extended updates.
You won't be able to in macOS without OpenCore Legacy Patcher and a lot of faith in your God of choice.
>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...
who cares?
when a closed source app fails the door is shut for good on self-remediation, unless you want to reverse engineer/break the law.
when an open source app fails to compile you can choose to put the time in to get the thing working. it's not a shut door, it's just a long path.
> who cares?
The problem is that most software people use for work is going to be closed source because the vendor wants to make money on these juicy business contracts.
Linux makes a point of being very difficult to be used with closed source stuff, in kernel and userland alike (getting static compilation to work is an utter PITA), and that is a reason why commercial software written for Linux is rare, and that in turn is the dominant reason why Linux adoption on the workstation has been very slow for a very long time - until a lot of business applications shifted to the browser, making the client OS platform all but irrelevant.
It’s trivial to use containerization technologies like flatpak to get software to run on any Linux distro. Companies don’t put in the effort, even though it’s much easier than maintaining deb and rpm packages.
Couldn’t agree with this more. Stuff I wrote 25 years ago for NT4 still actually works on windows 10 without a recompile.
The Linux situation reminds me of unix back in the 90s even across distributions.
> 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.)
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.
Command-line tools are fine like this; a full-fledged GUI apps, not so much on account of how Cocoa/AppKit/UIKit evolved. Your x86_64 slice would have to deal with all shenanigans between 10.7 and 26, and I suspect it’s not fun at all.
It's certainly more challenging for user-facing apps with UIs, but still doable. XLD does it. The key is to keep the UI simple, avoid chasing design trends, and avoid custom widgets.
I have had to get rid of several computers recently that will not run Windows 11. They weren’t 12 years old.
Consumer electronics, what do you expect ...
Any reason to "upgrade"? I am still on Sonoma and don't see a point updating the system.
Of course, right as I discover this tool and start using it to make ISO files, it's deprecated.
Rosseta too
this ones gonna fuck me up. i actually think this one is going to destroy some goodwill, it specifically is worth maintaining...forever. and they have the resources to do it.
They say that only a guy have worked fulltime on rosseta, so I think they don’t care too much
Been raving about my $3500 2021 (maybe 2020) m1 max 64gb outlasting the Windows x86 laptops I'd probably have replaced 2 maybe 3 times by now, but it absolutely feels slower this year to the point I reinstalled macos for the first time.
I don't know what they're doing but if they think I'm going to drop $6k for the similar m6 max now doing some planned obsolescence stuff I'll never be able to prove they're out of their minds.
I've heard golden gate is much faster than Tahoe but we'll see.
Tahoe has destroyed macOS performance. I’m running a maxed out last gen intel and was getting stuttering and slide showing straight out of the update. It was completely unusable until I turned on reduced transparency.
Colleagues on much better spec’d M1/2/3 all noted similar, but not quite so drastic, slow downs.
The hugest issue is search appears to be universal broken. Spotlight doesn’t work, finder doesn’t work, email doesn’t work. The other day I had to login to Gmail through the web app for the first time in about 5 years to find an email I knew existed that mail decided didn’t exist.
Insult to injury is the search indexing service appears to be somewhat responsible for slowdowns. It’s right up there with the famous “windows updating in the background” slowdowns.
could his root owned file problem be solved with a heaping helping of sudo?
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.
Totally normal. March of progress. Old stuff goes away.
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."
The former has been taking the latter’s job for years now.
Nobody really cares that they were originally for separate things.
What are you talking about? You can't operate on disk images with diskutil outside of the few commands diskutil image gives you. For example, if you need to check whether or not a disk image is encrypted, you can use hdiutil info and hdiutil isencrypted. If you use diskutil image info, you may be prompted for a password, which doesn't make sense to handle in a program.
A disk image is not just a fancy disk. Disks and disk images operate on different planes, which is why the distinction between diskutil and hdiutil exists.
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.
Progress is when we make things worse just because we can.
Username relevant as always.