Apple Didn’t Deprecate hdiutil to Improve macOS. They Did It to Control You.

You know that mini heart attack you get when you misread hidutil as hdiutil? Well, take a deep breath, because the nightmare is real this time. In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple has officially deprecated hdiutil.

If you’re a developer, sysadmin, or just a power user who relies on disk images and automation, you already know the feeling. You open your terminal, run a script you’ve perfected over a decade, and suddenly—nothing. Your workflow is dead in the water. You’ve been betrayed by the very UNIX underpinnings that Apple once championed.

Apple doesn’t kill features because they are broken; they kill them because they work too well without Apple’s permission.

Here is the twist that proves this isn’t about technical necessity. Apple didn’t actually remove the functionality of hdiutil. They just moved it into diskutil. If the exact same capabilities are still alive and well in another utility, why deprecate the tool that millions of stable scripts rely on?

Because it’s not about improving the user experience. It’s about asserting power over the ecosystem.

Look at the history. Apple removed the Telnet client and ntpd without warning anyone. They deprecated the xip format years ago, yet they still force you to download Xcode in that exact format. The message is clear: we own the environment, and we will change the rules whenever we want.

Any backwards compatibility from Apple is purely incidental—a temporary stay of execution until they decide your workflow is obsolete.

By breaking long-standing command-line tools, Apple is systematically eliminating third-party reliance on the terminal. They want to steer you, kicking and screaming if necessary, toward their own preferred interfaces, APIs, and GUIs. It is a deliberate strategy to break legacy workflows and force you to adapt to their evolving control over the system.

We used to love Apple because their machines just worked. Now, they work exactly the way Apple wants them to, and if your code doesn’t fit their vision, it’s collateral damage.

The terminal was the last unlocked door in the Apple ecosystem, and they are quietly changing the locks.