Jin’s WWDC Tech Trivia: Apple Native Containers Are Here!

Jin’s WWDC Tech Trivia: Apple Native Containers Are Here!

If you’ve deployed anything in bulk, you’re probably familiar with Docker containers. And let’s be honest — the official Docker Desktop experience on Apple Silicon has been pretty painful.

Most of us have switched to alternatives like the free Podman or the infamous Orbstack to survive in the Apple Silicon environment.

Podman runs without a daemon, but it still relies on a full VM (with LXC), and networking remains a hassle. Orbstack, arguably the best alternative, works so well because it runs a single, heavily modified Linux kernel (via LXC) and spins up dockerd inside it. Technically, it’s not fully isolated on Apple hardware — but it gets the job done.

Now, Apple has entered the chat — and open-sourced their own containerization tech.

Introducing native container support for Apple Silicon, where each container gets its own ultra-lightweight VM that boots up in under a second.

The best part? It’s already available in macOS 15 with the latest Xcode beta. No need to install the oddly looking macOS 26 just to test it.