Apple just dropped: Containers 🐳

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Apple quietly dropped something this week that could shake up how we run containers on macOS.

They’ve released an open-source project called Containerization, along with a CLI tool called container. It’s aimed at running Linux containers natively on Apple Silicon, but the way they approached this is completely different from what most of us are used to with Docker or Podman.

The typical setup today is spinning up one large VM that runs all your containers inside of it. That works, but it’s heavy, introduces overhead, and creates weird limitations around things like port mappings or system resource sharing.

Apple’s approach? They run each container inside its own lightweight VM, fully isolated, with its own dedicated IP. No bloated shared VM, no port conflicts, no strange Docker Desktop workarounds. And because they’re using Apple’s Virtualization framework under the hood, startup times are fast. They’re claiming sub-second container startup, and containers only consume CPU and memory while they’re actually running.

A few things that stand out:

Full OCI compatibility, so your existing Docker images will run
No core utilities or dynamic libraries baked into the container VM, reducing attack surface
Native support for networking, filesystem sharing, and container management through their Swift-based APIs
Runs natively on Apple Silicon, optimized for performance

It’s early. Version 0.1.0, and realistically you need macOS 26 to get the full networking and isolation benefits. But you can see where this is heading.

For anyone doing local container testing, running dev environments, or building Kubernetes workloads on Mac hardware, this could be a big deal down the road.

Curious how you see this playing out once it matures. Is this something you’d use over Docker Desktop or Podman?

Github: https://github.com/apple/container

Video: see below.

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