“There is a slim chance that you’ve never run nor heard of Apple’s Disk Utility application. That chance decreases the longer you’ve had a Mac as this little app is the answer to so many issue,” William Gallagher writes for MacNN. “It’s where you format new hard drives, create disk images, and where you used to be able to repair permissions if you needed to. If your Mac is doing something odd, you could run Disk Utility and have it poke about your hard drive, looking for possible problems, and often fixing them too. If you have many hard drives, such as in a RAID backup system, you lived in Disk Utility — or you used to. Apple has radically remodelled Disk Utility in OS X El Capitan and that’s got people steaming.”
“They’re steamed because the remodelling made the app easier for new or casual users to start with — but did so primarily by removing features,” Gallagher writes. “We have been before, we have been here a lot — just grab a sandwich and read the MacNN Feature Thief series. That week-long series examined how very often Apple takes a scorched Earth approach and destroys an old version of an app in favor of one that initially is significantly poorer.”
“We’ve felt the pain of Apple’s Feature Thief approach before but we thought we were sanguine about it, we thought we’d been through it so often that we always knew the workarounds and we always knew that Apple would put back what it took out,” Gallagher writes. “In this case we can just hope they do so soon, because this subtraction, even if it may be temporary, is unacceptable.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Power users, it’s back to the Terminal for you! Hopefully Apple updates Disk Utility with future OS X El Capitan point releases.
Now, what was that we wrote just this morning? Oh, yeah: Minimalism that ignores usability is poor UI design.
SEE ALSO:
6 Disk Utility changes in OS X El Capitan – October 23, 2015
Hands-on with OS X El Capitan’s redesigned Disk Utility – October 1, 2015
What was so hard about the old Disk Utility that they had to strip out functionality to make it simpler?
Apparently, repair permissions and other ‘missing’ features are now carried out automatically when El Cap is started or restarted.
That doesn’t excuse the elimination of the ability to manage RAID storage
not true.
just not true.
I use it all the time. It wasn’t that hard to figure out for my first time. But half of the people that ask me questions about how to use their computer don’t seem to know how to read what’s on their screen. “What do I click? Do I click OK? Now what?”
Glad I’m still on Yosemite! I might stay for a while.
El Capitan 11.1 & iTunes 12.3 ruined my iTunes ability to do anything. Beach Balls forever. Total crap. Used Time Machine to revert to Yosemite 10.4 & iTunes 12.3 where iTunes still works with only intermittent Beach Balls. Bad but not impossibly bad. No more updates for me.😩
i use it daily.
If the article is correct in saying few use the app – why then has Apple crippled it?
Makes no sense.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html
SOLUTION
http://www.macparc.ch/apps/RiparaCapo/
too
Looks like it’s time to write something that actually does the job. Maybe I can even get people to pay $5 for it.
If anything I’d love a Disk Utlity on steroids, not simplified for the idiots to the point of excluding features so as not to befuddle the easily confused. That’s just plain dumb. You simply hide all that “complexity” under an Advanced option, but it’s still there.
I have at least three utilities that fix permissions already. To me, taking this out is not a problem.
If you are really the power user that you imagine just switch to Onyx for these disk maintenance activities – and about 127 other functions. It’s free and it works with very little fuss.
then use OnyX
– its free
– its well regarded
– its written for El Captn
http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html
wish we had the Applejack utility back…
A few days ago Quick Time froze when I tried to play a video. In the old days a few minutes with “repair permissions” would fix that, but “first aid” is no aid. Now it is Sign Out, Shut Down, Boot Up, Sign On . . . And hope for the best.
I’m not sure “Repair Permissions” would do anything to fix a QuickTime freeze. It’s just as likely that quitting QuickTime and restarting fixed your problem.
Exactly. “Repair permissions” was one of those supposed panaceas that in actuality rarely had any real effect. For an old-time Mac reference, it’s the “zap the PRAM and rebuild the desktop” of OS X.
——RM
I hate to tell you this, but ‘repair permissions’ would have no effect on a frozen video. The thing that fixed it was most likely just quitting the QuickTime and reopening it.
‘Repair Permissions’ was one off those fixes that people knew sometimes worked, so it was one of 3 or 4 things they tried right off the bat. A permissions problem never manifests itself in the middle of using an application or document. It will always present itself when first opening something, like not being able to open a word document that you normally should be able to, or most commonly, an app that would appear to just bounce once in the dock but never open.
Permissions issues are just what they sound like. You don’t have permission to open a file. When this happens on accident (as opposed to a user trying to open another user’s home folder contents), it is usually after an install or update program did not return the permissions that were temporarily changed as part of the install or update. Repair permissions just resets those to what they should be, letting the user open the app or document again.
MicroApple. Or appleSoft. Or your headed in the wrong direction!!!!!!!!!
Fire Tim Cook!
If the buck stops at the top, then he is responsible either directly or indirectly for the mounting Apple software suckage.
If someone is using DU they better not be new or simple…maybe that’s what Apple’s managers and/or programmers are.
Send Apple the feedback. They may not act on feedback right away, but they do read them.
I’m curious if they do read it. Is it “Read-Delete, Read-Delete, Read-Delete”? I’ve sent multiple feedback messages about the dropping of linked text boxes from Pages, and never ever had a response, nor has the feature been restored. Did they really determine that nobody was using that feature? That would be crazy, because it’s a standard feature in competing page layout applications. Maybe they could not get it to work in the web app, so it had to be dropped from the desktop app in order to retain feature parity? That’s also crazy.
Feature Thief. That’s exactly what this is. Thanks for giving it a name!
What they will read is their returns on new apple TV.
I’d love for some proof someday that somebody reads that stuff. I’ve been hearing that for as long as that feedback mechanism’s existed, and the impression I’ve always gotten is that it’s a black hole.
A better solution to dumbing it down for idiots would have been to simply move it from /Applicaitons/Utilities to /System/Library/CoreServices where they would never find it but power users would.
Or there could be two different versions of Disk Utility; one for power users and another one for everyone else. The power user one could be called Disk Utility Pro while the more basic version could just be called Disk Utility or maybe Easy Disk Utility.
get Disk Warrior. It more deeply probes directory structure and repairs issues Disk Utility would bail out on.
And the stupification of OS X continues. Whatever Apple is drinking, they need to go on the wagon and start going to meetings.
Another day of whining. I’m not going to look, read, watch, or buy anything for a while. As Tom Petty sang (and Bob Dylan wrote), “You’re jamming me.”
No news is good news. I’m gonna just breathe, and listen to music for a while. Too much negativity. Hatred. Anger. Insanity. Too much of too much. (Politics, of course, is totally out of the question for now. Fugly.)
LOL. Politics will never be nice, because it’s the arena where ideas compete. Politics is bloodsport. And gee, wonder why people are angry? Maybe because they’re tired of the feds, judges, the press, campus busybodies, and the everpresent bureaucratia pushing them around? Want some peace? Tell progressives and liberals to celebrate diversity of political thought and stop censoring things they don’t like.
Good grief. It’s all the fault of the liberals. You’re being played by both parties, and apparently one in particular.
Exactly! Liberals misuse their freedom of religion. They feel that freedom of religion allows them to enforce their view of religion (or lack thereof) on everyone with impunity and they don’t realize that freedom of religion goes both ways; they think they can’t be criticized for their religion (or lack thereof).
I care less about the changes to Disk Utility than the repair functions of applications like Drive Genius 4 aren’t more capable.
Unfortunately, it means that the only 3rd party utilities you can rely on for disk maintenance (beyond the capabilities of DU) are TechTool Pro 8 and DiskWarrior.
Another way that El Capitan sucks? You don’t say. Hey Tim Ballmer, when are you going to fire up the troops? 🙂
Just one of the reasons I hate 10.11 and 10.10
APPLE needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
This Ive notion of pretty design at any cost is getting too much….And hurting apple products as Efficient ,ergonomic and coherent packages.
Repair permissions has always been voodoo, a 10.2 vix for a problem that only existed in 10.1.5. As an OS X user since 10.0, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve actually seen ‘Repair Permissions’ actually fix a problem, and have enough fingers left over to hold my beer 🙂
There is now a free app that re-enables manual repair of permissions in El Capitan. It is RiparaCapo and was just released October 30th. Here is where you can download it:
http://www.macparc.ch/apps/RiparaCapo/
Memories: My LEAST favorite act of Feature Thievery is the ruined version 6 of Airport Utility, which is used to set up and control Apple’s Airport routers. Version 5 was full features. But version 6 didn’t only hide advanced features. It REMOVED many of them, to the great horror of many advanced Apple gear users. Version 5, the good version of Airport Utility, was made non-functional as of OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I stopped using Airport routers and moved on to something as advanced as my interests.
I’m curious what routers you moved onto. I love my Apple routers but I do get frustrated by their lack of features when compared to other routers in their price category. The Security Now podcast constantly warns agains using cheap routers as they often do not receive security updates. So I’m wondering what you moved on to and what features you are finding useful.
I got a Netgear Nighthawk 1900ac instead of an Airport Extreme because of feature loss with newer versions of Airport Utility.
The Netgear was one of the few in my research that supports Mac-formatted USB3 hard drives as a network media server or file server (for the latter, it’s presented as a Windows/SMB network share, which is fine; bottom line is Netgear wasn’t lazy and supported *only* support FAT or NTFS-format hard drives). My non-Airprint printer instantly became network-reachable to my Macs and iOS devices after I plugged it into the second, slower USB2 port, too.
The admin UI is more complex than even the old Airport Utility, but to be frank, if you’re in the market for an expensive Airport Extreme you don’t want a feature-stripped admin tool that’s dumbed down for the Airport Express.
Yah, I use the newest Airport Extreme and it is annoying the lack of features. In particular I think it should have a VPN server. I know some people thing Back to my Mac is great but it isn’t the same. One of my friends runs a torrent client on his router. That would be super nice too.
At the moment I’m in a position of compromise. I have a high end Motorola (bought by Arris) cable modem that also does Wi-Fi. That is not considered the ideal situation, but I’m happy enough that I have left it at that. I can configure the hell out of the thing and it happily is ready for far faster Internet than I have now. I’m using Motorola because local Time Warner Cable comprehends and supports it. It is NOT the cable modem they themselves now offer to users. Superficial searching hasn’t lead me to the model they use, sorry. TWC then foists a cheapass, UN-updated (IOW exploit vulnerable) Linksys modem on victims then makes them pay rent for it. I hate TWC.
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-cable-modem/
NOTE: I had to take some personal action to block a now common exploit of my modem, one which Motorola hasn’t bothered to patch. It was easy to work around but is one that most people don’t even know about. That points out the primitive level of this technology, still, at this time.
Regarding favorite settings, no way am I going into that here. But I do like that the Motorola has better Wi-Fi network invisibility features than Apple’s, which are lame and worthless.
Disk Utility was a UTILITY, which means an app used frequently by Consultants, Power Users, Troubleshooters, and those of us who like to manage our hard disks and volumes. I use it often. Taking features out really is painful for those people. Apple did the same thing to Airport Utility. Apple’s strength is making computers easier to use. This is going in the opposite direction if we have to learn command line tools to get the same tasks done. Really disappointing.