Looking forward to Apple Container/Containerization tool in macOS 26, an alternative to Docker

talklittle
Sat, 27 Sep 2025 06:56:31 +0000

Haven't been following the macOS updates closely but a big feature I'm looking forward to in macOS 26 is Apple's container solution as an alternative to Docker.

The "container" command line tool: https://github.com/apple/container

The underlying Containerization package: https://github.com/apple/containerization

The main improvement over Docker on Mac is that it uses separate lightweight VMs per container, instead of one shared Linux VM hosting all containers. This means the RAM allocation can be dynamic instead of the user having to decide how many total GB to allocate for the Docker VM. So if I'm running a lot of containers I expect it to work without manually changing settings, and if I'm running only a single container then I expect it won't waste resources with allocated-but-unused RAM.

Currently these repos are on version 0.4.1 and 0.8.1 respectively, which tells me they're not ready yet. Hoping they're ready around the time macOS 26 releases to GA.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~comp/1qex/looking_forward_to_apple_container_containerization_tool_in_macos_26_an_alternative_to_docker

Votes: 29

Comments: 16