hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Apple deprecated the hdiutil command-line tool in macOS 27 Golden Gate.
The macOS 27 Golden Gate beta deprecates hdiutil in favor of diskutil image for all disk image operations. The author tested a home folder backup and found diskutil image was significantly faster (40-45 seconds vs 110-115 seconds) and produced a smaller DMG file (2.8 GB vs 2.89 GB). However, diskutil lacks several hdiutil options, including -puppetstrings, -scrub, and verbose logging. It also fails on root-owned files without prompting for authentication, unlike hdiutil. The author notes that hdiutil and diskutil still share a bug with .bnnsir files reported last year.
What commenters are saying
Commenters expressed skepticism about the deprecation, noting that Apple has deprecated other tools (xip, seatbelt, launchctl) without removing them, so hdiutil may persist. Several commenters criticized Apple's backwards compatibility and bug-reporting process, citing a pattern of ignoring reproducible bugs and asking for irrelevant information. One commenter argued that diskutil and hdiutil serve different purposes (disks vs. disk images) and that consolidating them is not straightforward. Another pointed out that Apple's hardware compatibility is better than its software compatibility reputation suggests.