Discussion summary
Davit introduced a new Apple Containers UI, a ~17MB app, sparking mixed reactions. Some compare it to existing solutions like OrbStack and Docker Desktop, discussing its features and resource usage.
What the discussion says
- Some see the app as a lightweight alternative to larger virtualization tools.
- Critics mention the small size as potentially virtue signaling.
- Others are curious about its performance and integration features.
“complaining about 17mb in 2026 has to be virtue signaling of some sort”
“Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images”
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- Hacker News
- Posted my own take of that here without any traction a few days ago
It supports containers, machines, registries with a menu bar app if anyone is interested by it
by erdaltoprak - Nice, I like the functionality and that it is a tiny native SwiftUI app. I recently wrote a blog [1] on using Apple containers for agentic coding; I just updated it to mention Davit. I so much prefer using Apple containers to using Docker on my two home Macs for personal projects.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/marklwatson/p/running-opencode...
- Unrelated. I noticed that the settings window (Cmd-,) text inputs all type from the right instead of the left like older macOS inputs (or web inputs[0])
Is that a thing macOS is moving to? I'm sure I've seen Apple use these too.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by lelandfe - Yeah it’s an unfortunate SwiftUI thingby linux2647
- Good catch, that was a bug; the value fields were trailing-aligned which makes SwiftUI insert like RTL. Fixed in 0.1.9.by xinit
- How does this compare to OrbStack? Do Apple Containers offer anything in the dev experience that I would notice? OrbStack’s implementation already feels lightning fast for my usage.
- Man I wish Apple would add docker api compatibility to Apple containersby ozarkerD
- Yeah. I don't quite understand this. Can I use this instead of docker desktop, to run docker containers on my mac 'natively' ? Or this is completely separate from docker ?by jaffa2
- This is focused on builds, so running either buildkitd or dockerd in an Apple containerization container. No port forwarding or host volume stuff (really its focused on running buildkit on mac) BUT complete integration with docker CLI and buildx.by cpuguy83
- Really nice. Worked perfectly downloading the runtime and running nginx:latest.
It's getting to the point that scrolling down on Github and seeing Claude as a contributor is a signal the app will be good (Native feeling, no Electron, etc)
by internet2000 - I've been a fan of Orbstack for make 2 years or so. Worth the cost for me because it's so well integrated and fast and docker command compatible.
I'll give this a try though.
by dllrr - It appears macOS native containers runs a separate Linux VM per container.
OrbStack's claim to fame is that all containers run in a single Linux VM, with lots of optimizations on both sides of the VM boundary (including use of a sparse image file for disk storage, which saves a lot of space on the macOS side).
If you run more than 4-5 containers on macOS, the performance and resource usage savings of OrbStack really starts to add up quickly.
by TimTheTinker - I’m guessing the OrbStack team will probably support MacOS native containers soon enough, with all their management goodness on top.by ttul
- Ha! Looks like we built the same thing: https://container-ui.fly.dev/
Now I wish I hadn't burned all those tokens!
by kylemclaren - Oh hi there - I just noticed you have a comparison to Orchard - that's me. Look slick we're all building the same thing ><
- Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:by bbg2401
- Hmm… how does one even pick between multiple vibe coded options?
I like to vet my options before committing to new software but who knows if the authors are gonna support these in a month? I don’t want to waste Fable tokens to fix bugs myself when they crop up.
by roger_ - and https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard but without vibe codingby bluejedi
- What stood out to me more than this particular project is the visible acceleration of a phenomenon many of us could foresee, especially over the last year or so: people can build a version of the same idea faster than ever.
After like 10 minutes of searching I found multiple similar swift projects (most of them are just a couple of weeks or months old):
https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app https://github.com/nico81/iContainer https://github.com/wouterdebie/davit https://github.com/Augani/dory https://github.com/tofa84/berth https://github.com/erdaltoprak/ContainerUtility https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard
There were more if you include ones with fewer GitHub stars, CLI-only, non-Swift etc. but you get the idea.
People will increasingly be able to build their own version of the software they want. As that happens the value of someone else's decreases. The era of hyper-personal software is coming.
by joohwan - Not on iOS unless you also pay annual membership to put it on the AppStore OR rebuild & reinstall the personal-account build every 30 or so days.
- Would you say these are all of equivalent, top notch, quality? I can't say I know that for certain.
Used to be you could use website polish and a few other surface level things to gauge the amount of effort that went into these types of things. Now that is easily finished LLMs. In a similar way, one of the biggest impacts of kick-starter now that the smoke has cleared is the aggressive evolution and refinement of the 3 minute pitch video.
Whether that actually translates into well thought through implementations and road-maps, and real momentum, I can't say.
by jayd16 - This looks like a really solid app. I like that it's 17 MB and uses the ContainerAPIClient library directly.
28 commits in 3 days, 5,015 lines of Swift, every commit "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5".
Also neat that it's signed/notarized. I installed it and it downloaded the necessary container platform stuff on first launch.
Suggestion: add a getting started tutorial to the site which suggests an image to try out and has screenshots (or a silent video) showing you how to get that image up and running and what you can do with it.
The create image dialog suggests "nginx:latest" but that's not a great starting demo.
by simonw - A tutorial with a slightly more realistic example would help a lot here. nginx:latest shows the plumbing works, but it doesn’t really show where Apple Containers feels different from Docker Desktop or OrbStack.
Something like a tiny app with a volume, port mapping, and a simple rebuild loop would make the value much easier to see.
by joka88xj - Great suggestion. Coming up.by xinit
- The AI-Maxing copy on the website kind of gave it away. Doesn't mean is not a great app though!
- My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
I had an idea like this and thought I could vibe code it, but then I figured someone else would care more and do it first. I was right!
This looks like a great app and I'm excited to try it out.
Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
More awesome: let me provision multiple user accounts inside the VM and restrict filesystem / network policy by user. Then I can have a dev agent, QA agent, etc. each with its own view of the work. That would be a powerful base layer for further automation.
Of course I should be able to provision various resources "attached" to the VM that agents can use on a permissioned basis; e.g., DB, queue, external volume, and so forth.
by _doctor_love - > Free idea: ...
I have been thinking about this too. Is it not as simple as installing Claude in the VM and connecting via an SSH terminal, or if you want a GUI use VSCode with the Remote SSH extension, which will give you the file browser UI etc. Presumably you can extensions in the VSCode Claude/whatever chat extensions in the VM too.
by RossBencina - I threw something like this together w a simple browser front end, mostly because I like running mid to large open models but can’t trust them to not go insane. Will share at some point soonby rao-v
- Sandbox and separate user instead of VM but sandvault is good for this and does auto install (full disclosure: have made some PRs to it).by mikemcquaid
- > My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
This was also my strategy before AI. At some point in my late 20s or early 30s I all but completely stopped doing any development in my free time, because I was entirely over any fun I derived from coding per se (in truth, I'd never been that into it, I'd just been really bad at guessing what would or would not be worth spending time on) and, as they say, the "juice wasn't worth the squeeze" for almost anything that popped into my head that might be a nice program or script to have (like that xkcd chart about the payoff time for developing programs that save X minutes per week or whatever) or else it was something that wasn't necessary but might just be interesting or fun to have, but nowhere near worth the many hours it'd take to make it happen. If someone made what I wanted and released it, awesome! If not, oh well.
The big change with LLMs is now I can shit out little scripts and such in a few minutes and for pennies, maybe a couple dollars. I'm dragging old extremely-niche ideas out of mothballs because what would have been several weekends of work (most of these ideas would require lots of poking around unfamiliar APIs and documentation, not just immediately writing the thing I want) can now be done in a half-hour or less—or, at least, I can find out if something's going to be unworkable or too fiddly to screw with after all and should be completely and permanently abandoned, in minutes rather than hours.
by topgrain2