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.
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)
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
`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."
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's in vogue to rag on Apple because of its size/influence/market cap. Annoying, very. They are hovering around 14% desktop marketshare. Is the other 86% fairing so much better?
Thank God we’ve got a sensible centrist here!
You haven’t used hdiutil? Well, I have. And I don’t really do anything esoteric on my computers (for someone that runs command-line utilities at all). Do we now cancel each other out or something? Or is the fact that you specifically haven’t used it some sort of superior indicator?
What’s your point? “Yeah, well, the other guys suck as well” isn’t valid criticism.
> It's in vogue to rag on Apple because of its size/influence/market cap.
Article author here. I've been a Mac developer and blogging about the Mac since 2006, before iPhone was even announced, when Apple was much smaller in size/influence/market cap. Nothing about my blog is "in vogue".
> I've used hdutil perhaps never.
Why are you commenting on an article about hdiutil, which you've never used and can't even spell?
And why would you think that a technical comparison of the hdiutil and diskutil command-line utilities would be an effective way to "rag" on Apple?
Hi lapcat, apologies, I meant no disrespect to you in my comment. I had a knee jerk reaction to what seemed to me "another Apple bad" post and exercised bad judgement. Cheers.
It's just frustrating that knee-jerk reactions are ubiquitous in the Hacker News comments, on every popular submission, despite the site guidelines urging the opposite.
In my case, this forum is habit forming to engage in the comment section. If a post has enough comments, to me it signals it's an interesting topic, never mind if I don't know anything about the subject matter, there might be very smart folks sharing knowledge. Comments can veer wildly off the original topic and I find that also appealing. This is "unfair" to the submitted post, of course, but ... HN is still here.
I'm not complaining about tangents, though, but rather about dismissive insults. A tangent is a conversation starter, whereas a knee-jerk dismissal is a conversation stopper.
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).
Or you know, they could have just decided to sunset the utility for any other reason a couple of angry self-proclaimed greybeards might just not be aware of.
But then again this is HN. Every commenter here is in the right. Always. Irrevocably. No question. Always.
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?
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
This is like saying to a cop that's pulled you over for speeding "I pay for your salary".
Yes, you do. But so do a bunch of other people do as well. And someone has to decide how to balance the needs of the many, which is where management / governance comes it: and said management has decided that the resources will be spent, or not spent, on certain things.
> It's more like I report a crime and the cops don't do anything about it, a situation in which I feel fairly justified being upset?
Sure. With cops, a public service. But Apple is not a public service (this is an analogy after all).
You gave them money for what they offered at a particular point in time because you thought it provided you value; has Apple taken away anything that you purchased? Did they go from x.2 to x.3 and break/remove something? That's certainly a dick move. But you are still getting what you paid for.
But Apple is free to change its offerings in the future based on what it thinks its customers need/want, and you are free to re-evaluate whether those changes still provide you with value, and whether you want to continue giving them money.
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
> I like how the $4.5T company can’t pay for the 100 engineering hours a year to maintain this […]
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs
Perhaps Apple is a "$4.5T company" because of the fact that they don't 'waste' time/energy on things they don't feel create value (for the company itself or for the company's customers)?
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.
73 comments
[ 0.34 ms ] story [ 7.0 ms ] thread[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/master/src/sys/windows/...
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
> 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.
Brother, it’s Apple. Any backwards compatibility is purely incidental.
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.
Things change but this is hardly some sort of sudden rug pull by Apple.
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.
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.
Does all Apple users have Stockholm syndrome or it's just simple sunk cost fallacy?
Nobody really cares that they were originally for separate things.
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.
Username relevant as always.
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.
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.
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.
I've used hdutil perhaps never.
What’s your point? “Yeah, well, the other guys suck as well” isn’t valid criticism.
See how that works? You can make anything sound ridiculous if you write it down like a 5yo who’s just discovered reddit.
Pipe down. Please.
Article author here. I've been a Mac developer and blogging about the Mac since 2006, before iPhone was even announced, when Apple was much smaller in size/influence/market cap. Nothing about my blog is "in vogue".
> I've used hdutil perhaps never.
Why are you commenting on an article about hdiutil, which you've never used and can't even spell?
And why would you think that a technical comparison of the hdiutil and diskutil command-line utilities would be an effective way to "rag" on Apple?
It's just frustrating that knee-jerk reactions are ubiquitous in the Hacker News comments, on every popular submission, despite the site guidelines urging the opposite.
Now back to hdiutil.
I'm not complaining about tangents, though, but rather about dismissive insults. A tangent is a conversation starter, whereas a knee-jerk dismissal is a conversation stopper.
But then again this is HN. Every commenter here is in the right. Always. Irrevocably. No question. Always.
This is like saying to a cop that's pulled you over for speeding "I pay for your salary".
Yes, you do. But so do a bunch of other people do as well. And someone has to decide how to balance the needs of the many, which is where management / governance comes it: and said management has decided that the resources will be spent, or not spent, on certain things.
Sure. With cops, a public service. But Apple is not a public service (this is an analogy after all).
You gave them money for what they offered at a particular point in time because you thought it provided you value; has Apple taken away anything that you purchased? Did they go from x.2 to x.3 and break/remove something? That's certainly a dick move. But you are still getting what you paid for.
But Apple is free to change its offerings in the future based on what it thinks its customers need/want, and you are free to re-evaluate whether those changes still provide you with value, and whether you want to continue giving them money.
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.
So in reality, AI has not changed your productivity at all, because you are using the extra time you saved to post on HN
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs
Perhaps Apple is a "$4.5T company" because of the fact that they don't 'waste' time/energy on things they don't feel create value (for the company itself or for the company's customers)?
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.
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.