macOS 26: Native container support delights developers – and not just them
If you don't want to use Docker or Orbstack, you no longer have to under macOS 26: There is native support for Linux containers directly from the terminal.
Containers in macOS 26: developers rejoice.
(Image: Apple / Screenshot Apple.com)
Developers, advanced amateurs and/or hobbyists love containers: they make it possible to run isolated environments with new systems and apps without disrupting the main operating system. Apple is now giving users a nice gift with macOS 26 alias Tahoe, which is due to be released in autumn: a containerization framework built directly into the operating system makes work easier.
Linux VM running smoothly on the Mac
"The containerization framework allows developers to create, download or run Linux container images directly on the Mac. It is based on an open source framework optimized for Apple Silicon and provides secure isolation between container images," the company writes in its announcement. Open source means here: Apple developed it, but is releasing the code. The new framework should have particular advantages in terms of system load distribution: If you use the usual Docker for your containers, this potentially draws a lot of power, as there have to be several isolation and virtualization layers. The direct competitor Orbstack does this better, but of course it cannot work as close to the system as Apple's own framework.
As Xe Iaso, CEO of Techaro from Ottawa, writes in a blog post, Apple could use this to make the Mac an even better development environment that is platform-neutral. The hope is that the containerization framework will run Linux VMs much more resource-efficiently in future. A developer at heise online summarizes this as follows: "Apple is providing OCI-compliant container support in a fast way. A lightweight VM runs in the background." However, this is container level, not VM level, "which was previously the case".
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Questions (still) remain
It will now be interesting to see how Orbstack reacts, which is already overtaking Docker in terms of performance. It is also unclear how fast Apple's framework will be when it comes to network and file system access. According to the documentation, there are still some limitations here. It will also be interesting to see whether the command is really available by default or whether – has to be installed with Xcode –.
As mentioned, Apple's containerization framework is open source. You can already see how it is implemented on GitHub. Above all, Xe Iaso would like to know how economical the framework really is –, for example, if you have an nginx container running in the background. It is also still unclear whether GPU APIs, Kubernetes and Rosetta (for x86 apps) are supported. macOS 26 is already available as a developer beta, so hopefully there will soon be answers to the open questions.
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