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.)

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

Gotta pump those metrics for the PMs

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.

Great, let’s deprecate everything never used by stasomatic, that will give us a much leaner OS.

> 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? I use hdiutil every day, so that's why I'm concerned.

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.

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.

Consumer electronics, what do you expect ...

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

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.

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."

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.