macOS Container Machines

To clarify a few comments here: this is not only OCI containers: container machines add support for persistence and filesystem mounting, making container machines a great lightweight Linux environment for developers using macOS. More details here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389

This is all fine and dandy, but where are the native Darwin Jails Apple? Still scared that people will filling whole rooms of Mac Minis if you allow them to have multiple macOS containers and not only up to two fat VMs per machine?

I belong to a rare breed of very opportunistic hobby-developers that like to use MacOS but also like to use linux machines or BSDs (rpi etc) sometimes.

I can create docker-images with docker compose, or use something like colima, which this seems to be close to (that should have some advantages over docker, although my hope of circumventing W^X page protection did not pan out).

I was perplexed that the repository does not put these container machines in context. The seem to be close to colima? When should I use which option (docker, collima, container machines ?)

Maybe others wonder too but are ashamed to ask. I have no shame ;)

Thanks for any pointers

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

Just to clarify, this requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe for "container" doesn't it? So those of us holding out on Sequoia who can't stand the broken glass UI or what's called and the other undesired features need to stick to Docker desktop.

Do these containers share a common kernel? Or are they each ran in a separate VM?

Edit: It's a VM per container. https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

Python binary wheels now have to be built for aarch64 for them to work inside the container, unless they are built using the corresponding build system while installing. It is not common for python binary libs to publish arm64 binary wheels, as most often they target amd64.

Always nice to have more options especially without third party tools

How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.

By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.

This is pretty cool - being able to bring your own container machine image goes a long way to helping it's adoption.

I started using Colima a couple of years ago because I got bored of how bad Docker Desktop was and just started using the CLI / the "Services" tool window in whatever Jetbrains IDE I was using at the time anyway. I can't see myself moving away from it any time - having multiple profiles is an absolute winner of a feature for me there, but maybe the next time I set up a Mac from scratch I'll have a play with this.

Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?

It's funny that the system config page (https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...) lists pebibytes for RAM configurations... in this day and age where buying a 16GB stick for workstation would cause me to eat instant ramen for a couple of months because my dentist needs an LLM chatbot on their page to stay competitive!

UX wise it looks kinda neat though!

Most of my team's development happens on beefy desktop machine in incus containers per dev+project (so you run yourname-projname-dev). It has its own tailscale inside so you can open it like regular https website or give to another dev to check out – no need to deploy your branch somewhere, just run it. New dev onboard takes 10 minutes from zero to dev env with VSCode remote development.

I would really love if apple could give inexpensive way to run amd64 containers for situations when dev wants to use their own hardware. We've used LIMA for now, was too much of a hussle. But if there's a more native experience – would give it another try.

Anyone know why you would use this instead of QEMU+Lima+Colima+Docker/containerd? The latter works on multiple OSes, has a very large ecosystem of tools, images, documentation, and lets you replace pieces as needed

The costs are startup time and image compatibility: dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd

I am trying it on but its brekaing on homebrew 1.0.0. The formula puts plugins at opt/container/libexec/container-plugins/ and the apiserver looks in libexec/container/plugins/

This can be solved through a symlink or smth

I've looked into replacing Lima with Apple Containers for https://runmachine.dev.

However, unlike Lima, an Apple Container is not a full VM, so you cannot SSH to it, or forward SSH-agent signatures into a machine.

So it's more of a devcontainer story, which is also a great use case. Nice to see Apple creating tooling around their VZ framework.

Edit: referential clarity.

I hope this brought us one step closer to being able to run our distros of choice very freely and easily on a Mac.

Is this new? I thought we had this already

In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed

update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681

Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs.

BSD actually has this already.

Apple containers are great for providing a sandbox to your AI coding agents

I have made it a MCP so that it's easily discoverable by all the coding agents

https://github.com/instavm/coderunner

So essentially both macOS and Windows now heavily support developing using Linux on them. They can't more openly admit that they are no match for Linux in that area.

There's some clever advertising in it for Linux, if Linux was advertising.

I'm surprised they cared enough to do this. I'd still rather use Linux but MacBook value is incredible.

Im running Multipass on M1 for full linux VMs. Are container machines better?

With the BUILD and WWDC 2026 announcements, it is the Year of Linux Containers Desktop.

Which for many folks is good enough for what they are doing, thus the status quo of desktop platforms will hardly change for current form factors.

Why did they have to invent their own solution instead of just shipping docker or an equivalent clone ?

Could this allow us to use proton on mac maybe?

In the intro it mentions automatically mapping user and home dir. So host files accessible the container. Any settings to control this?

Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.

We have WSL at home.

I was wondering if it's possible to have the container volume change to, say, an external drive. I currently use QMEU with qcow2 images to achieve this, works well enough.

Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.

With colima I can run AMD64 (x86) Linux containers in my Arm64 too. I think this is strictly for Arm64 Linux VMs, or is there some way to run x86 with this too?

WWDC presentation video:

Discover container machines

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389/

Is this going to be good for AOSP builds on Macs?

Can Podman support these eventually?

"LXC" for macOS?

Sounds like toolbox or distrobox for Mac!

I know its not going to be there but wish we had Windows as well.

Would be cool if you can redirect USB devices to the VM.

WSL-like implementation on macOS?

Just curious, Apple seems to copy orbstack.. haven’t they made an offer to acquire you guys?

Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?

Yeah but sitting in the tweak circles just to gather personal data about people to make them lose their minds is no bueno. Otipolfueriborsklineypoo

What FS mounts the Mac drives into the Linux container ?

It was unclear to me, is this a native replacement for docker? I like docker (on mac) but its quite the resource hog.

I usually run like a db, redis, maybe something like rabbitmq/zeromq and have a app that uses these services (makefile/docker-compose).

I would love to switch if this in fact is a lightweight replacement.

Is this similar to what cygwin was for windows? Could this be an alternative to homebrew?

I saw the video on this this is distrobox basically for Mac. It’s very cool. Seamless with your local files and the container. I’m very keen to try it.

Can macOS be run as a container machine on macOS?

darwin containers when?