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How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today? Perhaps the same peo

How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today? Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application. Spend 5 minutes with the app and you'll find a half dozen bugs and amateurish mistakes. It's baffling, and it's been a problem for two years now.

revelation 9y ago
But it looks very sleek now, with big graphs and fonts for the crucial information.
LeoNatan25 9y ago
Some genius decided they had to rewrite it. The current iteration looks like an intern shitshow rewrite, this bug included.
ulfw 9y ago
It's the iOSification of OS X. Sadly the whole OS is going in that wrong direction. I would like to know how many folks are working on MacOS vs iOS. Would put things into perspective.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  Hard to imagine that anyone at Apple sees MacOS (or the Mac in general) as a promising career path. All the 'A' players are either working on the iOS platform and devices, or have cashed out completely. Especially with the move toward forced open-plan workspaces in the new campus, I suspect Apple is going to have serious problems attracting and retaining key talent in the years ahead. They are reaching the point where stock options will no longer be a strong incentive due to lack of upside potential.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- brians 9y ago
  That’s funny. Disk Utility is the successor to Disk First Aid, which has been available since the mid-80s. It’s not the iOSification; it’s deep Mac tradition.
BRAlNlAC 9y ago
I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long. I understand that they want to make it simple for low level users, but that seems like a bad excuse in this case as low level users aren't even going to use Disk Utility, just like they aren't going to use Automater. It shows a blindness to their market, i think. Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade. The tech support is night and day, and problems are easy to fix thanks to built in, easy to use screen sharing, a robust OS, and well rounded modern hardware. At the same time I'm not a unix guru, I don't know Bash that well and when I'm forced to use it I spend a lot of time reading. I hate that they keep hiding more and more commands behind Bash precisely because it makes it significantly more difficult to do what I'll call "prosumer IT". One of the things that really sold me on Macs was when Disk Utility managed to repair a USB that was completely bricked on my windows machine. As of MacOS Sierra, I now have use bash to fix corrupted drives as they aren't displayed in the GUI. Such a pain and such a step backwards.
- derefr 9y ago
  There are times that installing macOS requires a trip through Disk Utility, is why. Disk Utility.app is basically made for the single use case of "modify the system to make macOS installable." The thing to understand, is that everyone inside Apple uses diskutil(8), not Disk Utility.app. diskutil(8) is the "canonical" way to do almost everything related to Disk management on macOS, the same way diskmgmt.msc is on Windows. Everything else is a secondary "convenience" view to just allow certain workflows (like installing macOS without overwriting things, or unlocking a FileVault volume with a master password to install macOS on it) to be accomplished more easily—like the Properties view of a disk drive in Windows. If there are other "convenience views" of disk management that you think would be helpful, why not make them into an app and sell it? One my favourite macOS programs, DaisyDisk, is basically just such a convenience view. People are willing to buy these—especially as a gift for their "prosumer" friends. Apple can't predict every use-case that a prosumer might want an accelerator for, but the free market probably can.
  - kccqzy 9y ago
    diskutil(8) is not that great either. Like reading passwords from the terminal without bothering to turn off echo.
Osmium 9y ago
There have been a few cases like this. Presumably the original was created/maintained by just one person, they move on, and then when the next person comes along they decide it's easier to re-write than modify the old code. But they don't have sufficient time and the new version is inferior to the old. Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS). I get the sense there's a lot of shuffling between teams in Apple, and teams are a lot smaller than you'd expect, and this is the inevitable result. The advantage (I'm guessing) is that they get to move quickly, and it reduces bureaucracy/politics, but ... yeah, this isn't great. At least diskutil is still there, and is as powerful as ever.
- dilap 9y ago
  1. dont have the same depth of dev talent they used to 2. mgmt that isnt as sensitive-to and focussed-on quality. (this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)
  - abakker 9y ago
    I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of head-scratching changes over the years, and I figure that the product managers just don't know who the features were for or what they're used for.
    - derefr 9y ago
      Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature? Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true? Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.
CamperBob2 9y ago
Sounds like it was built by people who couldn't make the cut for the Windows iTunes team.
pavement 9y ago
That fucking pie chart partition allocation bullshit. Christ almighty. The pain it inflicts upon me... Ever since that thing appeared it's been horrible. It errors if you look at it wrong, and who knows what it's really doing?
DonHopkins 9y ago
Does anyone remember the MacTCP control panel? It looked like an eager bright eyed bushy tailed summer intern did it in their spare time to impress their manager who had never heard of this Internet thing before, but who then couldn't get the rest of the company to buy into this weird TCP/IP thing, because it was distracting customers from using LocalTalk like they were meant to. But then they shipped it anyway, but never updated it after the intern left at the end of summer. http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html I get the same vibe from the current Terminal Preferences Profiles dialog, whose window you aren't allowed to resize, and which has the fixed size scrolling list of configurations, fixed width run command input field that doesn't let you see the whole command and makes it hard to edit, and many other cramped fields, whose labels are all clipped and scrolled, even when you click on them to edit the labels. Why the FUCK does anyone (ESPECIALLY Apple) use tiny fixed sized windows jam packed full of cramped tabbed and sub-tabbed dialogs with nested vertically scrolling lists of horizontally scrolling text fields, in these days of gigantic screens? Lights are on but nobody's home!
- not_kurt_godel 9y ago
  Yup. Same deal with the side panel in service preferences. The only way to even see the full name of a service beyond "[Thunder...thernet]", if it's longer than about 10 characters, is in the title bar of the Advanced settings pane.
- dng88 9y ago
  Got good memory of that though. At least compared with using Windows TCP protocol stack on which you have to find which is stable enough to use, not just config. Woolongong is the best ... You do not need to know this strange sound word to use TCP/IP.
KGIII 9y ago
One of the most-common complaints that I see about Apple is that they have allowed macOS' quality to steadily decline and the most-common speculation has been that this declination in quality is because macOS makes Apple less money than iOS. The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resources to work on both OSes. It's not like they don't have enough money to hire good developers. That is the complaint, however. It makes some sense, except that Apple could easily afford to invest in both macOS and iOS.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Manglement seems to have collectively forgotten that iOS app quality is dependent on macOS and tooling quality. Improve macOS, you put a lightness in devs' steps everywhere and iOS apps get even better. It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy. What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly. (I recently learned (I have no exposure to Apple, I'd like to but their stuff is expensive!!) that you can't just "go ahead and upgrade Xcode", but that you have to do it in a very specific/esoteric way or you break absolutely everything, and that it's not unreasonable sometimes to just nuke macOS from orbit and green-field reinstall everything.)
  - spydum 9y ago
    That last paragraph will seem familiar to anyone running prior versions of Windows... What an ironic turn of events!
  - astrange 9y ago
    Xcode is just an app (minus some bits shared with iTunes). What problems are you having updating it?
  - tosstossy 9y ago
    MacOS is a dead end, iOS is clearly where Apple is converging and you'll shortly see ARM laptops from Apple shipping iOS. It's only a matter of time before their flagship productivity-oriented products are running iOS.
beedogs 9y ago
Idono. HFS+ is pretty terrible, too. The people who wrote it surely could've written Disk Utility.
david-cako 9y ago
More evidence supporting this: the new Disk Utility.app seemingly has absolutely no way to recover from a fusion drive being split up into an HDD and SSD (made a mistake partitioning it) -- you have to do it from the command line. On the contrary, I booted the exact same machine into internet recovery (which gave me the Mavericks-era Disk Utility.app) and it literally had a huge warning that the fusion drive was partitioned incorrectly, and a repair button. Why remove important features that still (have to) exist in the underlying utility? Like this is literally an operating system designed to run on only a handful of hardware, which is why people like it.

revelation 9y ago

But it looks very sleek now, with big graphs and fonts for the crucial information.

LeoNatan25 9y ago

Some genius decided they had to rewrite it. The current iteration looks like an intern shitshow rewrite, this bug included.

ulfw 9y ago

It's the iOSification of OS X. Sadly the whole OS is going in that wrong direction. I would like to know how many folks are working on MacOS vs iOS. Would put things into perspective.

CamperBob2 9y ago
Hard to imagine that anyone at Apple sees MacOS (or the Mac in general) as a promising career path. All the 'A' players are either working on the iOS platform and devices, or have cashed out completely. Especially with the move toward forced open-plan workspaces in the new campus, I suspect Apple is going to have serious problems attracting and retaining key talent in the years ahead. They are reaching the point where stock options will no longer be a strong incentive due to lack of upside potential.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
brians 9y ago
That’s funny. Disk Utility is the successor to Disk First Aid, which has been available since the mid-80s. It’s not the iOSification; it’s deep Mac tradition.

BRAlNlAC 9y ago

I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long. I understand that they want to make it simple for low level users, but that seems like a bad excuse in this case as low level users aren't even going to use Disk Utility, just like they aren't going to use Automater. It shows a blindness to their market, i think. Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade. The tech support is night and day, and problems are easy to fix thanks to built in, easy to use screen sharing, a robust OS, and well rounded modern hardware. At the same time I'm not a unix guru, I don't know Bash that well and when I'm forced to use it I spend a lot of time reading. I hate that they keep hiding more and more commands behind Bash precisely because it makes it significantly more difficult to do what I'll call "prosumer IT". One of the things that really sold me on Macs was when Disk Utility managed to repair a USB that was completely bricked on my windows machine. As of MacOS Sierra, I now have use bash to fix corrupted drives as they aren't displayed in the GUI. Such a pain and such a step backwards.

derefr 9y ago
There are times that installing macOS requires a trip through Disk Utility, is why. Disk Utility.app is basically made for the single use case of "modify the system to make macOS installable." The thing to understand, is that everyone inside Apple uses diskutil(8), not Disk Utility.app. diskutil(8) is the "canonical" way to do almost everything related to Disk management on macOS, the same way diskmgmt.msc is on Windows. Everything else is a secondary "convenience" view to just allow certain workflows (like installing macOS without overwriting things, or unlocking a FileVault volume with a master password to install macOS on it) to be accomplished more easily—like the Properties view of a disk drive in Windows. If there are other "convenience views" of disk management that you think would be helpful, why not make them into an app and sell it? One my favourite macOS programs, DaisyDisk, is basically just such a convenience view. People are willing to buy these—especially as a gift for their "prosumer" friends. Apple can't predict every use-case that a prosumer might want an accelerator for, but the free market probably can.
- kccqzy 9y ago
  diskutil(8) is not that great either. Like reading passwords from the terminal without bothering to turn off echo.

Osmium 9y ago

There have been a few cases like this. Presumably the original was created/maintained by just one person, they move on, and then when the next person comes along they decide it's easier to re-write than modify the old code. But they don't have sufficient time and the new version is inferior to the old. Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS). I get the sense there's a lot of shuffling between teams in Apple, and teams are a lot smaller than you'd expect, and this is the inevitable result. The advantage (I'm guessing) is that they get to move quickly, and it reduces bureaucracy/politics, but ... yeah, this isn't great. At least diskutil is still there, and is as powerful as ever.

dilap 9y ago
1. dont have the same depth of dev talent they used to 2. mgmt that isnt as sensitive-to and focussed-on quality. (this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)
- abakker 9y ago
  I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of head-scratching changes over the years, and I figure that the product managers just don't know who the features were for or what they're used for.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature? Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true? Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.

CamperBob2 9y ago

Sounds like it was built by people who couldn't make the cut for the Windows iTunes team.

pavement 9y ago

That fucking pie chart partition allocation bullshit. Christ almighty. The pain it inflicts upon me... Ever since that thing appeared it's been horrible. It errors if you look at it wrong, and who knows what it's really doing?

DonHopkins 9y ago

Does anyone remember the MacTCP control panel? It looked like an eager bright eyed bushy tailed summer intern did it in their spare time to impress their manager who had never heard of this Internet thing before, but who then couldn't get the rest of the company to buy into this weird TCP/IP thing, because it was distracting customers from using LocalTalk like they were meant to. But then they shipped it anyway, but never updated it after the intern left at the end of summer. http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html I get the same vibe from the current Terminal Preferences Profiles dialog, whose window you aren't allowed to resize, and which has the fixed size scrolling list of configurations, fixed width run command input field that doesn't let you see the whole command and makes it hard to edit, and many other cramped fields, whose labels are all clipped and scrolled, even when you click on them to edit the labels. Why the FUCK does anyone (ESPECIALLY Apple) use tiny fixed sized windows jam packed full of cramped tabbed and sub-tabbed dialogs with nested vertically scrolling lists of horizontally scrolling text fields, in these days of gigantic screens? Lights are on but nobody's home!

not_kurt_godel 9y ago
Yup. Same deal with the side panel in service preferences. The only way to even see the full name of a service beyond "[Thunder...thernet]", if it's longer than about 10 characters, is in the title bar of the Advanced settings pane.
dng88 9y ago
Got good memory of that though. At least compared with using Windows TCP protocol stack on which you have to find which is stable enough to use, not just config. Woolongong is the best ... You do not need to know this strange sound word to use TCP/IP.

KGIII 9y ago

One of the most-common complaints that I see about Apple is that they have allowed macOS' quality to steadily decline and the most-common speculation has been that this declination in quality is because macOS makes Apple less money than iOS. The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resources to work on both OSes. It's not like they don't have enough money to hire good developers. That is the complaint, however. It makes some sense, except that Apple could easily afford to invest in both macOS and iOS.

exikyut 9y ago
Manglement seems to have collectively forgotten that iOS app quality is dependent on macOS and tooling quality. Improve macOS, you put a lightness in devs' steps everywhere and iOS apps get even better. It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy. What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly. (I recently learned (I have no exposure to Apple, I'd like to but their stuff is expensive!!) that you can't just "go ahead and upgrade Xcode", but that you have to do it in a very specific/esoteric way or you break absolutely everything, and that it's not unreasonable sometimes to just nuke macOS from orbit and green-field reinstall everything.)
- spydum 9y ago
  That last paragraph will seem familiar to anyone running prior versions of Windows... What an ironic turn of events!
- astrange 9y ago
  Xcode is just an app (minus some bits shared with iTunes). What problems are you having updating it?
- tosstossy 9y ago
  MacOS is a dead end, iOS is clearly where Apple is converging and you'll shortly see ARM laptops from Apple shipping iOS. It's only a matter of time before their flagship productivity-oriented products are running iOS.

beedogs 9y ago

Idono. HFS+ is pretty terrible, too. The people who wrote it surely could've written Disk Utility.

david-cako 9y ago

More evidence supporting this: the new Disk Utility.app seemingly has absolutely no way to recover from a fusion drive being split up into an HDD and SSD (made a mistake partitioning it) -- you have to do it from the command line. On the contrary, I booted the exact same machine into internet recovery (which gave me the Mavericks-era Disk Utility.app) and it literally had a huge warning that the fusion drive was partitioned incorrectly, and a repair button. Why remove important features that still (have to) exist in the underlying utility? Like this is literally an operating system designed to run on only a handful of hardware, which is why people like it.