Okay, the AI stuff is cool, but that "Containerization framework" mention is kinda huge, right? I mean, native Linux container support on Mac could be a game-changer for my whole workflow, maybe even making Docker less of a headache.
12_throw_away · 4h ago
FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever):
Containerization provides APIs to:
[...]
- Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times.
- Spawn lightweight virtual machines.
- Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines.
WSLv1 never supported a native docker (AFAIK, perhaps I'm wrong?)
That said, I'd think apple would actually be much better positioned to try the WSL1 approach. I'd assume apple OS is a lot closer to linux than windows is.
selkin · 1h ago
This doesn't look like WSL1. They're not running Linux syscalls to the macOS kernel, but running Linux in a VM, more like the WSL2[0] approach.
It's impossible to have "native" support for Linux containers on macOS, since the technology inherently relies on Linux kernel features. So I'm guessing this is Apple rolling out their own Linux virtualization layer (same as WSL). Probably still an improvement over the current mess, but if they just support LXC and not Docker then most devs will still need to install Docker Desktop like they do today.
tensor · 6h ago
Apple has had a native hypervisor for some time now. This is probably a baked in clone of something like https://mac.getutm.app/ which provides the stuff on top of the hypervisor.
neuralkoi · 5h ago
In case you're wondering, the Hypervisor.framework C API is really neat and straightforward:
One of the reasons OrbStack is so great is because they implement their own hypervisor: https://orbstack.dev/
Apple’s stack gives you low-level access to ARM virtualization, and from there Apple has high-level convenience frameworks on top. OrbStack implements all of the high-level code themselves.
watermelon0 · 5h ago
Using a hypervisor means just running a Linux VM, like WSL2 does on Windows. There is nothing native about it.
Native Linux (and Docker) support would be something like WSL1, where Windows kernel implemented Linux syscalls.
mdaniel · 5h ago
Surely if Windows kernel can be taught to respond to those syscalls, XNU can be taught it even easier. But, AIUI the Windows kernel already had a concept of "personalities" from back when they were trying to integrate OS/2 so that zero-to-one for XNU could be a huge lift, not the syscalls part specifically
kergonath · 2h ago
> the Windows kernel already had a concept of "personalities" from back when they were trying to integrate OS/2 so that zero-to-one for XNU could be a huge lift, not the syscalls part specifically
XNU is modular, with its BSD servers on top of Mach. I don’t see this as being a strong advantage of NT.
shawnz · 1h ago
WSL1 didn't use the existing support for personalities in NT
literalAardvark · 4h ago
Exactly. So it wouldn't necessarily be easier. NT is almost a microkernel.
9dev · 3h ago
Yep. People consistently underestimate the great piece of technology NT is, it really was ahead of its time. And a shame what Microsoft is doing with it now.
petersellers · 5h ago
Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, so Linux and Windows are both running as virtual machines but they have direct access to hardware resources.
It's possible that Apple has implemented a similar hypervisor here.
tensor · 4h ago
> The Containerization framework enables developers to create, download, or run Linux container images directly on Mac. It's built on an open-source framework optimized for Apple Silicon and provides secure isolation between container images
That's their phrasing, which suggests to me that it's just a virtualization system. Linux container images generally contain the kernel.
hackyhacky · 4h ago
> Linux container images generally contain the kernel.
No, containers differ from VMs precisely in requiring dependency on the host kernel.
tensor · 4h ago
Hmm, so they do. I assumed because you pulled in a linux distro that the kernel was from that distro is used too, but I guess not. Perhaps they have done some sort of improvement where they have one linux kernel running via the hypervisor that all containers use. Still can't see them trying to emulate linux calls, but who knows.
froggit · 3h ago
> I assumed because you pulled in a linux distro that the kernel was from that distro is used too,
Thst's how docker works on WSL2, run it on top of a virtualised linux kernal. WSL2 is pretty tightly integrated with windows itself, stil a linux vm though. It seems kinda weird for apple to reinvent the wheel for that kind of thing for containers.
froggit · 3h ago
> Thst's how docker works on WSL2, run it on top of a virtualised linux kernal. WSL2 is pretty tightly integrated with windows itself, stil a linux vm though. It seems kinda weird for apple to reinvent the wheel for that kind of thing for containers.
Can't edit my posts mobile but realized that's, what's the word, not useful... But yeah, sharing the kernal between containers but otherwise makes them isolated allegedly allows them to have VMesque security without the overhead of seperate VMs for each image. There's a lot more to it, but you get the idea.
pjmlp · 4h ago
It is as native as any Linux cloud instance.
jzelinskie · 6h ago
The screenshot in TFA pretty clearly shows docker-like workflows pulling images, showing tags and digests and running what looks to be the official Docker library version of Postgres.
paxys · 6h ago
Every container system is "docker-like". Some (like Podman) even have a drop-in replacement for the Docker CLI. Ultimately there are always subtle differences which make swapping between Docker <> Podman <> LXC or whatever else impossible without introducing messy bugs in your workflow, so you need to pick one and stick to it.
cogman10 · 2h ago
If you've not tried it recently, I suggest give the latest version of podman another shot. I'm currently using it over docker and a lot of the compatibility problems are gone. They've put in massive efforts into compatibility including docker compose support.
Yeah, from a quick glance the options are 1:1 mapped so an
alias docker='container'
Should work, at least for basic and common operations
bandoti · 6h ago
What about macOS being derived from BSD? Isn’t that where containers came from: BSD jails?
I know the container ecosystem largely targets Linux just curious what people’s thoughts are on that.
p_ing · 5h ago
OS X pulls some components of FreeBSD into kernel space, but not all (and those are very old at this point). It also uses various BSD bits for userspace.
Conceptually similar but different implementations. Containers uses cgroups in Linux and there is also file system and network virtualization as well. It's not impossible but it would require quite a bit of work.
formerly_proven · 5h ago
„Container“ is sort of synonymous with „OCI-compatible container“ these days, and OCI itself is basically a retcon standard for docker (runtime, images etc.). So from that perspective every „container system“ is necessarily „docker-like“ and that means Linux namespaces and cgroups.
pjmlp · 4h ago
With a whole generation forgetting they came first in big iron UNIX like HP-UX.
9dev · 3h ago
Does it really matter, tho?
bandoti · 2h ago
Another reason it matters is they might have done it differently which could inspire future improvements. :)
I like to read bibliographies for that reason—to read books that inspired the author I’m reading at the time. Same goes for code and research papers!
pjmlp · 2h ago
Some people think it matters to properly learn history, instead of urban myths.
McAlpine5892 · 5h ago
BSD jails are architected wholly differently from what something like Docker provides.
Jails are first-class citizens that are baked deep into the system.
A tool like Docker relies using multiple Linux features/tools to assemble/create isolation.
Additionally, iirc, the logic for FreeBSD jails never made it into the Darwin kernel.
Someone correct me please.
dboreham · 5h ago
> what something like Docker provides
Docker isn't providing any of the underlying functionality.
BSD jails and Linux cgroups etc aren't fundamentally different things.
enceladus06 · 4h ago
WSL throughput is not enough for file intensive operations. It is much easier and straightforward to just delete windows and use Linux.
msgodel · 5h ago
If they implemented the Linux syscall interface in their kernel they absolutely could.
vips7L · 4h ago
Aren't the syscalls a constant moving target? Didn't even Microsoft fail at keeping up with them in WSL?
koito17 · 4h ago
Linux is exceptional in that it has stable syscall numbers and guarantees stability. This is largely why statically linked binaries (and containers) "just work" on Linux, meanwhile Windows and Mac OS inevitably break things with an OS update.
Microsoft frequently tweaks syscall numbers, and they make it clear that developers must access functions through e.g. NTDLL. Mac OS at least has public source files used to generate syscall.h, but they do break things, and there was a recent incident where Go programs all broke after a major OS update. Now Go uses libSystem (and dynamic linking)[2].
They're not really a moving target (since some distros ship ancient kernels, most components will handle lack of new syscalls gracefully), but the surface is still pretty big. A single ioctl() or write() syscall could do a billion different things and a lot of software depends on small bits of this functionality, meaning you gotta implement 99% of it to get everything working.
asabil · 4h ago
Not Linux syscalls, they are a stable interface as far as the Linux kernel is concerned.
rjsw · 2h ago
FreeBSD and NetBSD do this.
NewJazz · 4h ago
They didn't.
pjmlp · 4h ago
WSL 1.0, given that WSL 2.0 is regular Linux VM running on HYPER-V.
LoganDark · 5h ago
I wonder if User-Mode Linux could be ported to macOS...
wmf · 4h ago
It would probably be slower than just running a VM.
selkin · 58m ago
It looks like nothing here is new: we have all the building blocks already. What Apple done is packaged it all nicely, which is nothing to discount: there's a reason people buy managed services over just raw metal for hosting their services, and having a batteries included development environment is worth a premium over the need to assemble it on your own.
thde · 4h ago
> Meet Containerization, an open source project written in Swift to create and run Linux containers on your Mac. Learn how Containerization approaches Linux containers securely and privately. Discover how the open-sourced Container CLI tool utilizes the Containerization package to provide simple, yet powerful functionality to build, run, and deploy Linux Containers on Mac.
> Containerization executes each Linux container inside of its own lightweight virtual machine.
That’s an interesting difference from other Mac container systems. Also (more obvious) use Rosetta 2.
selkin · 1h ago
Podman Desktop, and probably other Linux-containers on macOS tools, can already create multiple VMs, each hosting a subset of the containers you run on your Mac.
What seems to be different here, is that a VM per each container is the default, if not only, configuration.
And that instead of mapping ports to containers (which was always a mistake in my opinion), it creates an externally routed interface per machine, similar to how it would work if you'd use macvlan as your network driver in Docker.
Both of those defaults should remove some sharp edges from the current Linux-containers on macOS workflows.
mmcnl · 5h ago
It's cool but also not as revolutionary as you make it sound. You can already install Podman, Orbstack or Colima right? Not sure which open-source framework they are using, but to me it seems like an OS-level integration of one of these tools. That's definitely a big win and will make things easier for developers, but I'm not sure if it's a gamechanger.
All those tools use a Linux VM (whether managed by Qemu or VZ) to run the actual containers, though, which comes with significant overhead. Native support for running containers -- with no need for a VM -- would be huge.
SpaceNugget · 3h ago
there's still a VM involved to run a Linux container on a Mac. I wouldn't expect any big performance gains here.
mmcnl · 3h ago
Yes, it seems like it's actually a more refined implementation than what currently exists. Call me pleasantly surprised!
mrbonner · 3h ago
The containerization experience on macOS has historically been underwhelming in terms of performance. Using Docker or Podman on a Mac often feels sluggish and unnecessarily complex compared to native Linux environments. Recently, I experimented with Microsandbox, which was shared here a few weeks ago, and found its performance to be comparable to that of native containers on Linux. This leads me to hope that Apple will soon elevate the developer experience by integrating robust containerization support directly into macOS, eliminating the need for third-party downloads.
nottorp · 2h ago
Docker at least runs a linux vm that runs all those containers. Which is a lot of needless overhead.
The equivalent of Electron for containers :)
WhyNotHugo · 4h ago
The ground keeps shrinking for Docker Inc.
They sold Docker Desktop for Mac, but that might start being less relevant and licenses start to drop.
On Linux there’s just the cli, which they can’t afford to close since people will just move away.
Docker Hub likely can’t compete with the registries built into every other cloud provider.
aequitas · 3h ago
There is already a paid alternative, Orbstack, for macOS which puts Docker for Mac to shame in terms of usability, features and performance. And then there are open alternatives like Colima.
marcalc · 1h ago
Use OrbStack for sometime, made my dev team’s m1 run our kubernetes pods in a much lighter fashion. Love it.
cromka · 2h ago
How does it compare to Podman, though?
pjmlp · 3h ago
That is why they are now into the reinventing application servers with WebAssembly kind of vibe.
9dev · 3h ago
It’s really awful. There’s a certain size at which you can pivot and keep most of your dignity, but for Docker Inc., it’s just ridiculous.
amelius · 2h ago
They got Sherlocked.
marviel · 6h ago
yeah -- I saw it's built on "open source foundations", do you know what project this is?
If I had to guess, colima? But there are a number of open source projects using Apple's virtualisation technologies to run a linux VM to host docker-type containers.
Once you have an engine podman might be the best choice to manage containers, or docker.
underdeserver · 6h ago
The CLI sure looks a lot like Docker.
cmiles74 · 6h ago
Being able to drop Docker Desktop would be great. We're using Podman on MacOS now in a couple places, it's pretty good but it is another tool. Having the same tool across MacOS and Linux would be nice.
9dev · 3h ago
Migrate to Orbstack now, and get a lot of sanity back immediately. It’s a drop-in replacement, much faster, and most importantly, gets out of your way.
mgreg · 5h ago
There's also Rancher Desktop (https://rancherdesktop.io/). Supports moby and containerd; also optionally runs kubernetes.
samgranieri · 5h ago
I have to drop docker desktop at work and move to podman.
I'm the primary author of amalgamation of GitHub's scripts to rule them all with docker compose so my colleagues can just type `script/setup` and `script/server` (and more!) and the underlying scripts handle the rest.
Apple including this natively is nice, but I won't be a able to use this because my scripts have to work on linux and probably WSL
jbverschoor · 5h ago
Orbstack
acedTrex · 5h ago
Colima is my guess, only thing that makes sense here if they are doing a qemu vm type of thing
mbreese · 5h ago
That's my guess too... Colima, but probably doing a VM using the Virtualization framework. I'll be more curious if you can select x86 containers, or if you'll be limited to arm64/aarch64. Not that it really makes that much of a difference anymore, you can get pretty far with Linux Arm containers and VMs.
WD-42 · 4h ago
Should be easy enough, look for the one with upstream contributions from Apple.
Oh, wait.
mehdibl · 2h ago
It's a VM just like WSL... So yeah.
wmf · 6h ago
They Sherlocked OrbStack.
12_throw_away · 4h ago
Well, Orbstack isn't really anything special in terms of its features, it's the implementation that's so much better than all the other ways of spinning up VMs to run containers on macos. TBH, I'm not 100% sure 2025 Apple is capable anymore of delivering a more technically impressive product than orbstack ...
It would be better for the OrbStack guy if they bought it.
WD-42 · 3h ago
Apple sees some nice code under a pushover license and they just can’t help themselves.
wmf · 3h ago
Interestingly it looks like Apple has rewritten much of the Docker stack in Swift rather than using existing Go code.
pjmlp · 3h ago
Microsoft did it first to Virtual Box / VMWare Workstation thought.
That is what I have been using since 2010, until WSL came to be, it has been ages since I ever dual booted.
DrBenCarson · 5h ago
Orbstack has been pretty bulletproof
No comments yet
dang · 5h ago
Ok, I've squeezed containerization into the title above. It's unsatisfactory, since multiple announced-things are also being discussed in this thread, but "Apple's kitchen-sink announcement from WWDC this year" wouldn't be great either, and "Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers to foster creativity, innovation, and design" is right out.
It seems like a big step in the right direction to me. It's hard to tell if its 100% compatible with Docker or not, but the commands shown are identical (other than swapping docker for container).
Even if its not 100% compatible this is huge news.
No comments yet
nodja · 5h ago
> Apple Announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc.
This sounds like apple announced 2 things, AI models and container related stuff
I'd change it to something like:
> Apple Announces Foundation Models, Containerization frameworks, more tools
dang · 4h ago
The article says that what was announced is "foundation model frameworks", hence the awkward twist in the title, to get two frameworkses in there.
LoganDark · 5h ago
Small nitpick but "Announces" being capitalized looks a bit weird to me.
Me too - I thought I'd fixed that! Fixed now, thanks.
gdubs · 3h ago
There's a different thread if you want to wax about Fluid Glass etc [1], but there's some really interesting new improvements here for Apple Developers in Xcode 26.
The new foundation frameworks around generative language model stuff looks very swift-y and nice for Apple developers. And it's local and on device. In the Platforms State of the Union they showed some really interesting sample apps using it to generate different itineraries in a travel app.
The other big thing is vibe-coding coming natively to Xcode through ChatGPT (and other) model integration. Some things that make this look like a nice quality-of-life improvement for Apple developers is the way that it tracks iterative changes with the model so you can rollback easily, and the way it gives context to your codebase. Seems to be a big improvement from the previous, very limited GPT integration with Xcode and the first time Apple Developers have a native version of some of the more popular vibe-coding tools.
Their 'drag a napkin sketch into Xcode and get a functional prototype' is pretty wild for someone who grew up writing [myObject retain] in Objective-C.
Are these completely ground-breaking features? I think it's more what Apple has historically done which is to not be first into a space, but to really nail the UX. At least, that's the promise – we'll have to see how these tools perform!
Does that explain why you don't have to worry about token usage? The models run locally?
hbcondo714 · 2h ago
> You don’t have to worry about the exact tokens that Foundation Models operates with, the API nicely abstracts that away for you [1]
I have the same question. Their Deep dive into the Foundation Models framework video is nice for seeing code using the new `FoundationModels` library but for a "deep dive", I would like to learn more about tokenization. Hopefully these details are eventually disclosed unless someone else here already knows?
Looks like software UI design – just like fashion, film, architecture and many other fields I'm sure – has now officially entered the "nothing new under the sun" / "let's recycle ideas from xx years ago" stage.
To be clear, this is just an observation, not a judgment of that change or the quality of the design by itself. I was getting similar vibes from the recent announcement of design changes in Android.
daveidol · 6h ago
To me it looks more like Windows Vista's "Aero" than OS X's "Aqua".
SlowTao · 3h ago
And I couldnt be happier to see it back. I have not been a fan of the flattening of UI design over the last 15 years.
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h ago
But the opposite of "flat" is not "transparent".
This was posted in another HN thread about Liquid Glass: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC . I'm sure Apple will tweak the opacity before it goes live, but this looks horribly insane to me.
NoPicklez · 24m ago
Agreed, people have said perhaps its Apple's way of bringing VR vibes to the UI, showing layers of UI elements.
But I'm not so sure if I want transparent.
buildbot · 5h ago
Yes, I immediately thought of Windows Aero too!!! I wasn’t able to enable it until I got a 9800GX2 a few years later, very cool at the time combined with the ability to have movies as your desktop background. It was a nice vibe.
Open link and type into this box "physicality is the new skeumorphism"
Read on and:
They are completely dynamic: inhabiting characteristics that are akin to actual materials and objects. We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
Well worth reading for the retrospective of Apple's website taking a twenty year journey from flatland and back.
crooked-v · 6h ago
I kind of hate it. Every use of it in the videos shown so far has moments where it's so transparent as to have borderline unreadable contrast.
kayodelycaon · 4h ago
Same. And white on light blue is just as bad. Looks like I’ll be using more accessibility features.
MBCook · 1h ago
This is the first time I have ever thought “maybe I don’t want to update my phone“. Entirely because of the look.
zapzupnz · 36m ago
In Settings -> Accessibility -> Display, you can enable Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency to get rid of some of the worse glass effects, and Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion, you can enable Reduce Motion to get rid of the some of the light effects for content passing under glass buttons.
summarity · 6h ago
The last example in the first carousel is the worst, the bottom glass elements have complete unreadable text
SlowTao · 3h ago
I agree with you, I hope they quickly tweak this into something more readable. There could be a really nice mid ground here.
ordinaryradical · 6h ago
I used to find these changes compelling but now I think they are mostly a pain in the ass or questionable.
Proof of a well-designed UI is stability, not change.
Reads to me strongly of an effort to give traditional media something shiny to put above the headline and keep the marketing engine running.
spike021 · 6h ago
I’m usually on board with Apple UI changes but something about all the examples they showed today just looked really cheap.
My only guess is this style looks better while using the product but not while looking at screenshots or demos built off Illustrator or whatever they’re using.
kif · 6h ago
I love it. Reminds me of Windows 7. The nostalgia is too strong with this one.
sho_hn · 2h ago
In fact, Apple once did a version of Aqua that did an overengineered materials-based rasterization at runtime, including a physically correct glass effect.
It was too slow and was later optimized away to run off of pre-rendered assets with some light typical style engine procedural code.
Feels like someone just dusted off the old vision now that the compute is there.
Barrin92 · 4h ago
Just one or two years ago I remember a handful of articles popping up that Gen Z was really into Frutiger Aero, that's the first thing I thought of, with the nature themes and skeuomorphic UI elements.
Thanks, I wasn't even aware the style had gotten a name in the meantime.
SlowTao · 3h ago
Back when Jobs was introducing one of the Mac OS X versions, there was a line that stuck with me.
Showing off the pulsating buttons he said something like "we have these processors that can do billions of calculations of second, we might as well use them to make it look great".
And yet a decade later, they were undoing all of that to just be flat an boring. Im glad they are using the now trillions of calculations a second to bring some character back into these things.
scyzoryk_xyz · 2h ago
He was selling. The audience were sales. OS's were fully matured at that point. Computers were something you buy at a store. It was a selling point.
A decade later they were handling the windfall that came with smartphone ascendancy. An emergence of an entirely new design language for touch screen UI. Skeumorphism was slowing that all down.
Making it all flat meant making it consistent, which meant making it stable, which meant scalability. iOS7 made it so that even random developers' apps could play along and they needed a lot of developers playing along.
dheera · 1h ago
The world flip flops from flat to 3D UI design every few years.
We were in a flat era for the last several years, this kicks off the next 3D era.
breadwinner · 4h ago
Liquid Glass is not adding a dimension. It is still flat UI, sadly. They just gave the edges of the window a glass like effect. There's also animation ("liquid" part). Overall, very disappointing.
pxc · 5h ago
I hoped for a moment that "Containerization Framework" meant that macOS itself would be getting containers. Running Linux containers and VMs on macOS via virtualization is already pretty easy and has many good options. If you're willing to use proprietary applications to do this, OrbStack is the slickest, but Lima/Colima is fine, and Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop work well, too.
The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways to run Linux VMs, but actual, native containers-- macOS containers. And third parties can't really implement this well without Apple's cooperation. There have been some efforts to do this, but the most notable one is now defunct, judging by its busted/empty website[1] and deleted GitHub organization[2]. It required disabling SIP to work, back when it at least sort-of worked. There's one newer effort that seems to be alive, but it's also afflicted with significant limitations for want of macOS features[3].
That would be super useful and fill a real gap, meeting needs that third-party software can't. Instead, as wmf has noted elsewhere in these comments, it seems they've simply "Sherlock'd" OrbStack.
Providing isolated environments for CI machines and other build environments!
If the sandboxing features a native containerization system relied on were also exposed via public APIs, those could could also potentially be leveraged by developer tools that want to have/use better sandboxing on macOS. Docker and BuildKit have native support for Windows containers, for instance. If they could also support macOS the same way, that would be cool for facilitating isolated macOS builds without full fat VMs. Tools like Dagger could then support more reproducible build pipelines on macOS hosts.
It could also potentially provide better experiences for tools like devcontainers on macOS as well, since sharing portions of your filesystem to a VM is usually trickier and slower than just sharing those files with a container that runs under your same kernel.
For many of these use cases, Nix serves very well, giving "just enough" isolation for development tasks, but not too much. (I use devenv for this at work and at home.) But Nix implementations themselves could also benefit from this! Nix internally uses a sandbox to help ensure reproducible builds, but the implementation on macOS is quirky and incomplete compared to the one on Linux. (For reasons I've since forgotten, I keep it turned off on macOS.)
raydev · 2h ago
Clean build environments for CICD workflows, especially if you're building/deploying many separate projects and repos. Managing Macs as standalone build machines is still a huge headache in 2025.
BrandonSmith · 1h ago
What's wrong with Cirrus CLI and Tart built on Apple's Virtualization.framework?
Tart is great! This is probably the best thing available for now, though it runs into some limitations that Apple imposes for VMs. (Those limitations perhaps hint at why Apple hasn't implemented this-- it seems they don't really want people to be able to rent out many slices of Macs.
One clever and cool thing Tart actually does that sort of relates to this discussion is that it uses the OCI format for distributing OS images!
(It's also worth noting that Tart is proprietary. Some users might prefer something that's either open-source, built-in, or both.)
wpm · 4h ago
Same thing containers/jails are useful for on Linux and *BSD, without needing to spin up an entirely separate kernel to run in a VM to handle it.
tensor · 4h ago
MacOS apps can already be sandboxed. In fact it's a requirement to publish them to the Mac App Store. I agree it'd be nice to see this extended to userland binaries though.
Etheryte · 4h ago
You can't really sandbox development dependencies in any meaningful way. I want to throw everything and the kitchen sink into one container per project, not install a specific version of Python, Node, Perl or what have you globally/namespaced/whatever. Currently there's no good solution to that problem, save perhaps for a VM.
uv doesn't provide strong isolation; a package you install using uv can attempt to delete random files in your home folder when you import it, for example.
NewJazz · 4h ago
People use containers server side in Linux land mostly... Some desktop apps (flatpak is basically a container runtime) but the real draw is server code.
Do you think people would be developing and/or distributing end user apps via macOS containers?
doctorpangloss · 4h ago
Orchestrating macOS only software, like Xcode, and software that benefits from Environment integrity, like browsers.
One of Apple's biggest value props to other platforms is environment integrity. This is why their containerization / automation story is worse than e.g. Android.
pxc · 4h ago
Ah, that's great! I'd forgotten it moved and struggled to track it down.
chakintosh · 6h ago
Some 15 years ago, A friend of mine said to me "mark my words, Apple will eventually merge OSX with iOS on the iPad". And with every passing keynote since then, it seemed Apple's been inching towards that prophecy, and today, the iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
paxys · 6h ago
The fact that they haven't done it in 15 years should be an indication that they don't intend to do it at all. Remember that in the same time period Apple rebuilt every Macbook from scratch from the chipset up. Neither the hardware nor software is a barrier to them merging the two platforms. It's that the ecosystems are fundamentally incompatible. A true "professional" device needs to offer the user full control, and Apple isn't giving up this control on an i-Device. The 30% cut is simply too lucrative.
Secure Boot on other platforms is all-or-nothing, but Apple recognizes that Mac users should have the freedom to choose exactly how much to peel back the security, and should never be forced to give up more than they need to. So for that reason, it's possible to have a trusted macOS installation next to a less-trusted installation of something else, such as Asahi Linux.
Contrast this with others like Microsoft who believe all platforms should be either fully trusted or fully unsupported. Google takes this approach with Android as well. You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
NotPractical · 1h ago
> You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can trivially root a Pixel factory image. And if you're talking about how they will punish you for that by removing certain features: Apple does that too (but to a lesser extent).
On Android devices with AVB (so basically everything nowadays), once the bootloader is unlocked, so many things already either lock you out or degrade your service in various ways. For example, Netflix will downgrade you to 480p, Google Pay will stop working, many apps will just straight up disappear from the Play Store because SafetyNet will stop passing (especially on newer devices with hardware attestation), banking apps (most notably Cash App) will often stop working, many other third-party apps that don't even have anything to do with banking will still lock you out, etc.
On many Android devices, unlocking the boot loader at any point will also permanently erase the DRM keys, so you will never again be able to watch high resolution Netflix (or any other app that uses Widevine), even if you relocked the bootloader and your OS passed verified boot checks.
On a Mac, you don't need to "unlock the bootloader" to do anything. Trust is managed per operating system. As long as you initially can properly authenticate through physical presence, you totally can install additional operating systems with lower levels of trust and their existence won't prevent you from booting back into the trusted install and using protected experiences such as Apple Pay. Sure, if you want to modify that trusted install, and you downgrade its security level to implement this, then those trusted experiences will stop working (such as Apple Pay, iPhone Mirroring, and 4K Netflix in Safari, for instance), but you won't be rejected by entire swathes of the third-party app ecosystem and you also won't lose the ability to install a huge fraction of Mac apps (although iOS and iPadOS apps will stop working). You also won't necessarily be prevented from turning the security back up once you're done messing around, and gaining every one of those experiences back.
So sure, you can totally boil it down to "Apple still punishes you, only a bit less", but not only do they not even punish your entire machine the way Microsoft and Google do, but they even only punish the individual operating system that has the reduced security, don't punish it as much as Microsoft and Google do, and don't permanently lock things out just because the security has ever been reduced in the past.
Do keep in mind though, the comparison to Android is a bit unfair anyway because Apple's equivalent to the Android ecosystem is (roughly; excluding TV and whatever for brevity) iPhone and iPad, and those devices have never and almost certainly will never offer anything close to a bootloader unlock. I just had used it as an example of the all or nothing approach. Obviously Apple's iDevice ecosystem doesn't allow user tampering at all, not even with trusted experiences excluded.
Fun fact though: The Password category in System Settings will disappear over iPhone Mirroring to prevent the password from being changed remotely. Pretty cool.
amoshebb · 3h ago
the only macbook I’ve tried to put linux on was a t2 machine, and it still doesn’t sleep/suspend right, so I’m a bit skeptical that apple is really leading the way here, but maybe I’ve just not touched any recent windows devices either
LoganDark · 17m ago
To be fair, sleep/suspend has been a rather infamously difficult problem for Linux when it comes to devices that weren't designed to run Linux. I think the Macs with T2 chips were a bit weird anyway and I wonder if they had already been working on Apple Silicon Macs that far back and that's why the T2 became a thing?
bigyabai · 44m ago
If anyone wants to read up on all the features Apple didn't implement from Intel Macs that made Linux support take so long, here is a list of UEFI features that represents only a small subset of the missing support relative to AMD and Intel chipsets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Features
Alternatively, read about iBoot. Haha, just kidding! There is no documentation for iBoot, unlike there is for uBoot and Clover and OpenCore and SimpleBoot and Freeloader and systemd-boot. You're just expected to... know. Yunno?
LoganDark · 20m ago
To be fair, this is how homebrew for Apple devices has always worked. You've always had to effectively reverse engineer the platform in order to write privileged code. Although I get the argument that if Apple were explicitly trying to support alternative operating systems they probably could have done more to make it easy, really what they were doing with this was first and foremost enabling additional use cases for macOS, and then maybe silently doing it in a way that third parties would also be able to benefit from. The Asahi wiki does a bit of a better job of explaining this, but the suspicion is that Apple did this not necessarily to make it easier for alternative operating systems to exist but to prevent the Mac from needing to be jailbroken when alternative operating systems were bound to happen anyway.
burntalmonds · 5h ago
I think practically everyone is better off with a laptop. iPad is great if you're an artist using the pencil, or just consuming media on it. Otherwise a macbook is far more powerful and ergonomic to use.
poulsbohemian · 5h ago
I think perhaps you are overestimating the computing needs of the majority of the population. Get one of the iPad cases with a keyboard and an iPad is in many ways a better laptop.
nottorp · 2h ago
But the majority won't pay extra for an ipad and a keyboard, when they can pay less for an air with everything included...
NewJazz · 4h ago
Or maybe a stand and separate keyboard. Better ergonomics than a laptop that way with similar portability.
Karrot_Kream · 4h ago
Any keyboard you recommend? I'm looking around myself.
NewJazz · 3h ago
Something wireless would be nice for portability IMO, e.g. Apple or Logitech Bluetooth. Security considerations there though.
I wouldn't want a numpad. A track point would be ape.
I struggle with keyboard recommendations b/c I'm not fully satisfied lol.
focusedone · 3h ago
I used to think that, not having used an iPad. Now I carry a work-issued iPad with 5G and it's actually pretty convenient for remote access to servers. I wouldn't want to spend a day working on it, but it's way faster than pulling out a laptop to make one tiny change on a server. It's also great for taking notes at meetings/conferences.
It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested wasteland. There are so many ads in YouTube and streaming music. I had no idea.
It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need to figure out a better solution for that.
So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming media. Who knew?
pkage · 2h ago
There's native ad blocking on iOS and has been for a while—I've found that to significantly enhance the usability of the device. I use Wipr[0], other options are available.
I use Wipr on my phone, the experience is a lot worse than ublock origin on desktop...
threeseed · 3h ago
> practically everyone is better off with a laptop
The majority of the world are using their phones as a computing device.
And as someone with a MacBook and iPad the later is significantly more ergonomic.
solomatov · 2h ago
I prefer MacBook to iPad most of the time. The only use case for iPad for me where it shines is when I need to use a pencil.
ZeroTalent · 5h ago
I don't understand why my MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen. I'm switching to an iPad Pro tomorrow. I use Superwhisper to talk to it 90% of the time anyway.
dexwiz · 5h ago
My theory is because of the hinge, which is a common point of failure on laptops. Either you are putting extra strain on it by having someone constantly touching the screen, and some users just mash their fingers into touch screens. Or users want a fully openable screen to mimic a tablet format, and those hinges always seem to fail quicker. Every touchscreen laptop I've had eventually has had the hinge fail.
raydev · 2h ago
Apple is capable of solving it if they want to. They don't want to (yet at least).
thetallguyyy · 4h ago
Because MacBooks have subpar displays, at least the M4 Air does. The iPad Pro is a better value.
losvedir · 6h ago
I don't use an iPad much, but it's been interesting to watch from afar how it's been changing over these years.
They could have gone the direction of just running MacOS on it, but clearly they don't want to. I have a feeling that the only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it more in their walled garden.
I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get, ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary branch.
hamandcheese · 4h ago
Its obvious isn't it? It will look like a desktop, except Apple decides what apps you can run and takes their 30% tax on all commerce.
athenot · 5h ago
Whether or not they eventually fuse, I don't know—I doubt it. But the approach they've taken over the past 15 years to gradually increase the similarities in user experience, while not trying to force a square peg in a round hole, have been the best path in terms of usability.
I think Microsoft was a little too eager to fuse their tablet and desktop interface. It has produced some interesting innovations in the process but it's been nowhere near as polished as ipadOS/macOS.
jeron · 6h ago
ipad hardware is a full blown M chip. There's no real hardware limitation that stops the iPad from running macOS, but merging it cannibalizes each product line's sales
chakintosh · 6h ago
The new windowing feature basically cannibalizes MacBook Air.
threetonesun · 6h ago
A Macbook Air is cheaper than an iPad Pro with a keyboard though. Not to mention you still can't run apps from outside the app store, and most of these new features we're hoping work as well as they do on MacOS, but given that background tasks had to be an API, I doubt they will.
tarentel · 6h ago
There's still software I can't run on an iPad which is basically the only reason I have a MacBook Air. Maybe for some a windowing system may be the push to switch but that seems doubtful to me.
dcchambers · 5h ago
> The iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want. Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode - only runs on MacOS.
The changes to window management are great - but iPad and iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
renrutal · 4h ago
With Microsoft opening Windows's kernel to the Xbox team, and a possible macOS-iPadOS unification, we are reaching multiple levels of climate changes in Hell. It's hailing!
Bengalilol · 4h ago
> I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
For the same price, you still get a better mac.
msgodel · 5h ago
They can't do this. It would destroy their ability to rent their iOS users out because they'd have access to dev tools and could "scale the wall."
omega3 · 6h ago
Does an iPad allow for multiple users?
crooked-v · 6h ago
Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough.
thimabi · 4h ago
I don’t think that’s bizarre at all, there’s a clear financial incentive for things to be this way. Apple can’t have normal people sharing a single device instead of buying one for each.
alwillis · 5h ago
> Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough
In education or corporate settings, where account management is centralized, you want each person who uses an iPad to access their own files, email, etc.
eastbound · 4h ago
I wish Apple provided the MDM, rather than relying on a random consumer ecosystem of dodgy companies who all charge 3-18$ per machine per month, which is a lot.
Auth should be Apple Business Manager; image serving should be passive directories / cloud buckets.
cj · 27m ago
Apple launched their own solution last year (maybe it was the year before).
I told that to John Gruber and he said never will happen
jonplackett · 5h ago
I wish they’d focus on just enabling actual functionality on iPad - like can I have Xcode please? And a shell?
I dgaf what the UI looks like. It’s fine.
kmeisthax · 6h ago
Nothing Apple can do to iPadOS is going to fix the fundamental problem that:
1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled from an iPhone app, and
2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.
Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1. Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those things not immediately chew through your battery.
[0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software lockout.
w10-1 · 1h ago
HN should have a conference-findings thread for something like WWDC, with priority impact rankings
P4: Foundation models will get newbies involved, but aren't ready to displace other model providers.
P4: New containers are ergonomic when sub-second init is required, but otw no virtualization news.
P2: Concurrency now visible in instruments and debuggable, high-performance tracing avoid sampling errors; are we finally done with our 4+ years of black-box guesswork? (Not to mention concurrency backtracking to main-thread-by-default as a solution.)
P5: UI Look-and-feel changes across all platforms conceal the fact that there are very few new API's.
Low content overall: Scan the platforms, and you see only L&F, app intents, widgets. Is that really all? (thus far?) - It's quite concerning.
Also low quality: online links point no where, half-baked technologies are filling presentation slots: Swift+Java interop is no where near usable, other topics just point to API documentation, "code-along" sessions restating other sessions.
Beware the new upgrade forcing function: adding to the memory requirements of AI, the new concurrency tracing seems to require M4+ level device support.
xpe · 2h ago
> including over 250,000 APIs that enable developers to integrate their apps with Apple’s hardware and software features.
This doesn’t sound impressive, it sounds insane.
glhaynes · 1h ago
Which ones would you like to get rid of?
badc0ffee · 2h ago
The video on Containerization.framework, and the Container tool, is live [0].
It looks like each container will run in its own VM, that will boot into a custom, lightweight init called vminitd that is written in Swift. No information on what Linux kernel they're using, or whether these VMs are going to be ARM only or also Intel, but I haven't really dug in yet [1].
> Every Apple Developer Program membership includes 200GB of Apple hosting capacity for the App Store. Apple-Hosted Background Assets can be submitted separately from an app build.
Is this the first time Apple has offered something substantial for the App store fees beyond the SDK/Xcode and basic app distribution?
Is it a way to give developers a reason to limit distribution to only the official App Store, or will this be offered regardless of what store the app is downloaded from?
glhaynes · 1h ago
Background Assets have existed for years. I’m not sure that 200GB figure is new.
Klonoar · 3h ago
Huh. Does this cover if you use public CloudKit databases...?
nehalem · 6h ago
I wonder what happened to Siri. Not a single mention anywhere?
m3kw9 · 6h ago
hope to show you more later this year. was like the first thing they said about apple intelligence
can16358p · 2h ago
I hope they don't turn Liquid Glass into Aqua... which I hated. The only time I started to like the iOS interface was iOS 7 with flat design. I hope they don't turn this into old, skeuomorphic, Aqua-like UI by time.
minimaxir · 6h ago
They also just announced that Shortcuts can use these endpoints (or Private Cloud Compute or ChatGPT).
bishfish · 3h ago
I sure hope they provide an accessibility option to turn down translucency to improve contrast or this UI is a non-starter for me. Without using it, this new UI looks like it may favor design over usability. Why don’t they do something more novel and let user tweak interface to their liking?
glhaynes · 1h ago
They’ve had Reduce Transparency (under Accessibility) for a long time now. It still works.
encom · 3h ago
>favor design over usability
That's... kinda what Apple is famous for.
dorian-graph · 5h ago
Will they ever update Terminal.app?
visiondude · 3h ago
They did!!! At least color options. Just announced at platform state of the union
dorian-graph · 1h ago
Yes! In another comment of mine, that was the main thing I mentioned, haha.
Unlikely to happen soon. It’s maintained by one engineer who is very against anything resembling iTerm2.
garciasn · 5h ago
Just use iTerm2 (Warp or Kitty are two other options out of many) and be done w/it; why would Apple even worry about this when so few people who care about terminal applications even think twice about it?
dorian-graph · 5h ago
I've tried all of them, including ones that yourself, and others, haven't mentioned like Rio. I stand by wanting Terminal.app simply updated with better colour support, then it's one less alternative program to get.
Onavo · 5h ago
Also ghostty
mohsen1 · 6h ago
iPad update is going to encourage a new series of folks trying to use iPads for general programming. I'm curious how it goes this time around. I'm cautiously optimistic
msgodel · 5h ago
Isn't it still impossible to run any dev tools on the iPad?
zapzupnz · 30m ago
Not quite. As another user mentioned, there's Swift Playgrounds which is complete enough that you can even upload apps made in it to the App Store. Aside from that, there are also IDEs like Pythonista for creating Python-based apps and others for Lua, JavaScript, etc. many of which come with their own frameworks for making native iOS/iPadOS interfaces.
robterrell · 4h ago
IIRC Swift Playgrounds goes pretty deep -- a full LLVM compiler for Swift and you can use any platform API -- but you can't build something for distribution. The limitations are all at the Apple policy level.
eastbound · 4h ago
You can’t run Docker on an iPad.
visiondude · 6h ago
Excited to try these out and see benchmarks. Expectations for on device small local model should be pretty low but let’s see if Apple cooked up any magic here.
Illniyar · 4h ago
Oh, Apple is doing windows Aero now? Wonder how long that one'll last.
lenerdenator · 6h ago
I like that there's support for locally-run models on Xcode.
I wish I thought that the Game Porting Toolkit 3 would make a difference, but I think Apple's going to have to incentivize game studios to use it. And they should; the Apple Silicon is good enough to run a lot of games.
... when are they going to have the courage to release MacOS Bakersfield? C'mon. Do it. You're gonna tell me California's all zingers? Nah. We know better.
nikolayasdf123 · 5h ago
yeah, getting better LLM support for XCode is great!
elpakal · 7h ago
Hopefully not bound to SwiftUI like seemingly everything else Apple Intelligence so far. But on-device llm (private) would be real nice to have.
samcat116 · 4h ago
The api looks like "give it a string prompt, async get a string back", so not tied to any particular UI Framework.
datadrivenangel · 6h ago
"The framework has native support for Swift, so developers can easily access the Apple Intelligence model with as few as three lines of code."
Bad news.
KerrAvon · 6h ago
Swift != SwiftUI
tough · 3h ago
they mention kata, so is this using kata underneath instead of their Hypervisor.framework?
Repo says it uses Hypervisor.framework on Apple Silicon devices.
bearjaws · 4h ago
All this focus on low power gaming makes me think Apple wants to get in on the Steam Deck hype.
SlowTao · 3h ago
Apple is in a reasonably good place to make gaming work for them.
Their hardware across the board is fairly powerful (definetly not top end), they have a good API stack especially with Metal. And they have systems at all levels including TV. If they were to just make a standard controller or just say "PS5 dualshock is our choice" they could have a nice little slice for themselves.
TheAceOfHearts · 3h ago
As I understand it, Apple has a long history of entitlement and burning bridges with every major game developer while making collaboration extremely painful. They were in a much better place to make gaming work 10 years ago when major gaming studios were still interested in working with them.
raydev · 2h ago
They've been hyping up their hardware capabilities and APIs for years now.
throwaway314155 · 3h ago
Until Apple-ported games are able to be installed from Steam instead of the App Store, you can count me out.
bigyabai · 3h ago
They better have a partnership with Sony in the works, then. Valve and Apple's approach to supporting video games diverged a decade ago. Hearing "Steam" and "Apple" uttered in the same breath is probably giving people panic attacks already.
dblooman · 5h ago
Can someone who uses Xcode daily compare to say Cursor or VsCode how the developer experience is. Just curious how Apple is keeping up
nikolayasdf123 · 5h ago
XCode so far is very rudimentary. miles behind VSCode in autocomplete. autocomplete is very small, single line, and suggests very very rarely. and no other features except autocomplete exist.
very good to see XCode LLM improvements!
> I use VSCode Go daily + XCode Swift 6 iOS 18 daily
WhyNotHugo · 4h ago
Several years ago XCode also had “jump to definition” and a few other features.
pjmlp · 4h ago
WebKit is also being swiftified, as mentioned on the platforms state of the union.
Klonoar · 3h ago
As in they're integrating Swift into the WebKit project, or exposing Swift-y wrappers over WebKit itself?
pjmlp · 3h ago
There is probably going to be a session later this week, the reference seemed to imply they are integrating Swift into Webkit project for new development.
Klonoar · 1h ago
Interesting, I wonder if that pushes Swift on Linux further given other projects (webkitgtk etc).
simonw · 6h ago
Is there a beta we can install to try out these models yet?
> New Design with Liquid Glass
Yes, bringing back aqua! I even see blue in their examples.
babyshake · 5h ago
Does the privacy preserving aspect of this mean that Apple Intelligence can be invoked within an app, but the results provided by Apple Intelligence are not accessible to the app to be transmitted to their server or utilized in other ways? Or is the privacy preservation handled in a different way?
jonplackett · 5h ago
I think they just mean private from Apple. I don’t see how they can keep it private from the developer if it’s integrated into the app
bandoti · 6h ago
Not sure about that Liquid Glass idea.
Ultimately UI widgets are rooted in reality (switches, knobs, doohickeys) and liquid glass is Salvador-Dali-Esque.
Imagine driving a car and the gear shifter was made of liquid glass… people would hit more grannies than a self-driving Tesla.
bitpush · 6h ago
What model are they bundling? Something apple-custom? How capable is it?
Apple has their own models under the hood I believe. I remember from like a year or two ago they had an open line called "ELM" (Efficient Language Model), but I'm not sure if that's what they're actually using.
I am excited to see what the benchmarks look like though, once it's live.
tough · 3h ago
they also use their ANE and CoreML for smaller on-device stuff
iPadOS and OSX continue to converge into one platform.
xattt · 6h ago
Calling it: Apple allOS 27 incoming next year, with Final Cut Pro on your Apple Watch.
No comments yet
rconti · 6h ago
Multi-user iPadOS when?
xp84 · 5h ago
When they figure out how to make it not dent sales of individual devices. If you and your spouse could easily share one around the house for different purposes but still having each of your personal apps and settings, you might not buy two!
alwillis · 4h ago
> If you and your spouse could easily share one around the house for different purposes but still having each of your personal apps and settings, you might not buy two!
I get it, but an iPad starts at $349; often available for less.
At this point, an iPad is no different than a phone—most people wouldn't share a single tablet.
Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-user devices.
xp84 · 1h ago
> an iPad starts at $349; often available for less.
It's less about the cost and more about having to have another stupid device to charge, update, and keep track of, when a tablet is not a device that gets used enough by any one person to be worth all that. It would be much more convenient to have a single device on a coffee or end table which all family members could use when they need to do more than you can do on a phone.
> Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-user devices.
Maybe. Probably 90% of work laptops are single-user, I'm sure. But for home computers, multi-user can be very useful. And it's better than ever to use laptops as dumb terminals, since all most people's stuff is in the cloud. It's not nearly as much trouble to get your secondary user account on a spare laptop in the living room to be useful as it was in the Windows XP days. Just having a browser that's signed into your stuff, plus Messages or Whatsapp, and maybe Slack/Discord/etc. is enough.
> most people wouldn't share a single tablet.
Since iPads have never supported doing so in a sane way, that unfounded assertion is just as likely due to the fact that it's a terrible experience today, since if you share one today, someone else will be accidentally marking your messages as read, you'll be polluting their browser or YouTube history, etc.
It's also the kind of dismissive claim true Apple believers tend to trot out when someone points out a shortcoming: "Nobody wants to use a touchscreen laptop!" "Nobody wants USB-C on an iPhone when Lightning is slightly smaller!" "Nobody needs an HDMI port or SD slot on a MacBook Pro!" "Nobody needs a second port on the 12-inch MacBook!" Most of the above things have come true except the touch laptop, and somehow it hasn't hurt anyone, but the "nobody wants..." crew immediately stops when Apple finally [re-]embraces something
olyjohn · 6h ago
Never, it'll be single user MacOS.
turnsout · 7h ago
Thank goodness… this will hopefully help keep app bundle sizes down, and allow developers to avoid calling AI APIs for trivial stuff like summaries.
xyst · 5h ago
back to "glass" UI element/design? Early 2000s is back, I guess.
Edit: surprised apple is dumping resources into gaming, maybe they are playing the long game here?
amluto · 7h ago
> This year, App Intents gains support for visual intelligence. This enables apps to provide visual search results within the visual intelligence experience, allowing users to go directly into the app from those results.
How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like installed apps when searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name.
Spotlight is unbelievably bad and has been unbelievably bad for quite a few years. It seems to return things slowly, in erratic order (the same search does not consistently give the same results) and unreliably (items that are definitely there regularly fail to appear in search results).
cube2222 · 6h ago
Fwiw, spotlight in MacOS seems to be getting a major revamp too (basing this on the WWDC livestream, but there seems to be a note about it on their blog[0] too), pushing it a bit more in the direction of tools like Alfred or Raycast, and allegedly also being faster (but that's marketing speak of course, so we'll see when Fall comes).
“How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <…> searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name”
Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
amluto · 6h ago
I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single computer.
AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
olyjohn · 5h ago
Quicksilver worked great back in the day before Spotlight was ever even a thought.
busymom0 · 6h ago
I have no idea what happened to my Mac in the last month but for some reason, spotlight isn't able to search by name any app name anymore. Like if search for Safari, it will show me results for everything except the Safari app. Even tried searching for Safari.app and still no results. It can't find any apps.
doctorpangloss · 7h ago
User: yells Feedback into void.
retskrad · 6h ago
After reading the book "Apple in China", it’s hilarious to observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC presentations...
bigyabai · 6h ago
This just in: company that spends billions on marketing is effective at marketing their products. News at 11.
reaperducer · 4h ago
News at 11.
…10 Central and Mountain.
sheerun · 2h ago
k
vouaobrasil · 6h ago
Apple's integration of AI into its MacOS is the one reason why I am considering a switch back to Linux after my current laptop dies.
jw1224 · 6h ago
If that’s the one reason, have you considered just… not using the AI features?
doublerabbit · 6h ago
Sure you can for now. But what when it's forced upon you to use them?
jw1224 · 4h ago
Well if that hypothetical situation ever happens, you can just switch to Linux then.
sph · 4h ago
Why do you care if they switch now?
jug · 3h ago
There is no real need and the issue is hypothetical?
vouaobrasil · 6h ago
I find it offensive to have any generative AI code on my computer.
dkdcio · 6h ago
I promise you there is Linux code that has been tab-completed with Copilot or similar, perhaps even before ChatGPT ever launched
vouaobrasil · 5h ago
That is true. I actually was ambiguous in my post, because I meant code that generates stuff, not that was generated by AI, even though I don't like the latter, either.
socalgal2 · 6h ago
I think I know what you meant. You mean you don't want code that runs generative AI in your computer? But, what you wrote could also mean you don't want any code running that was generated by AI. Even with open source, your computer will be running code generated by AI as most open source projects are using it. I suspect it will be nearly impossible to avoid. Most open source projects will accept AI generated code as long as it's been reviewed.
vouaobrasil · 5h ago
Good point, and you were right. I was ambiguous. I meant a system that generates stuff, not stuff that was generated by AI. But I'd rather not use stuff that was generated by AI, either. But you are also right. That will become impossible, and probably already is. Not a very nice world, I think. Best thing to do then is to minimize it, and avoid computers as much as possible....
azinman2 · 6h ago
So, then don’t do that? It’s not like it’s automatically generating code without you asking.
vouaobrasil · 6h ago
I didn't say "generating code", I meant I find it offensive to have any code sitting on my computer that generates code, whether I use it or not. I prefer minimalism: just have on my computer what I will use, and I have a limited data connection which means even more updates with useless code I won't use.
reaperducer · 4h ago
I find it offensive to have any generative AI code on my computer.
Settings → Apple Intelligence and Siri → toggle Apple Intelligence off.
It's not enabled by default. But in case you accidentally turned it on, turning it off gets you a bunch of disk space back as the AI stuff is removed from the OS.
Some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.
zapzupnz · 23m ago
The theatrics of being *forced* to use completely optional, opt-in features has been a staple of discussions regarding Apple for years.
Every year, macOS and iPadOS look superficially more and more similar, but they remain distinct in their interfaces, features, etc. But the past 15 years have been "we'll be *forced* to only use Apple-vetted software, just like the App Store!"
And yeah, the Gatekeeper mechanism got less straight-forward to get around in macOS 15, but … I don't know, someone will shoot me down for this, but it's been a long 15 years to be an Apple user with all that noise going on around you from people who really don't have the first clue what they're talking about — and on HN, no less.
They can come back to me when what they say actually happens. Until then, fifteen dang years.
vouaobrasil · 21m ago
I have a limited connection, and don't want to update my computer with AI garbage.
antipaul · 4h ago
With a single toggle, you can turn off Apple Intelligence
See (System) Settings
echelon · 6h ago
This reads like the crotchety and persnickety 60-somethings in the 1990's who said the internet was a passing and annoying fad.
pests · 4h ago
I was musing before sleep days ago about how maybe the internet still is just a fad. We’ve had a few decades of it, yeah, but maybe in the future people will look at it as boring tech just like I viewed VCRs or phones when I was growing up. Maybe we’re still addicted to the novelty of it, but in the future it fades into the background of life.
I’ve read stories about how people were amazed at calling each other and would get together or meet at the local home with a phone installed, a gathering spot, make an event about it. Now it’s boring background tech.
We kind of went through a faze of this with the introduction of webcams. Omegle, Chatroulette, it was a wild Wild West. Now it’s normalized, standard for work with the likes of Zoom, with FaceTiming just being normal.
aquariusDue · 2h ago
A few years ago I would've said you were incredibly cynical, but nowadays with so much AI slop around social media and just tonnes of bad content I tend to agree with you.
I do think there is a lot of valid criticism of the internet. I certainly don't think it's an annoying fad but I do think it has caused a lot of bad things for humanity. In some ways, life was much better without it, even though there are some benefits.
sph · 4h ago
It is impossible to have a negative opinion of AI without silly comments like this just one step removed from calling you a boomer or a Luddite. Yes all technological progress is good and if you don’t agree you’re a dumb hick.
AI maximalists are like those 100 years ago that put radium everywhere, even in toothpaste, because new things are cool and we’re so smart you need to trust us they won’t cause any harm.
I’ll keep brushing my teeth with baking soda, thank you very much.
echelon · 2h ago
On the other side of that are the people screaming that AI is murder.
There are lots of folks like this, and it's getting exhausting that they make being anti-AI their sole defining character trait: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistHate
vouaobrasil · 20m ago
It's also exhausting to see endless new applications of AI, even worse IMO.
Joel_Mckay · 5h ago
Actually, most "AI" cults blindly worship at their own ignorance:
The ML hype-cycle has happened before... but this time everyone is adding more complexity to obfuscate the BS. There is also a funny callback to YC in the Lisp story, and why your karma still gets incinerated if one points out its obvious limitations in a thread.
Have a wonderful day, =3
sabareesh · 6h ago
Good move, not sure they are exposing other modalities as well ?
visarga · 7h ago
I guess LLM and AI are forbidden words in Apple language. They do their utmost to avoid these words.
simonw · 6h ago
They took the clever (in my opinion) decision to rebrand "AI" as "Apple Intelligence", presumably partly in order to avoid the infinite tired "it's not really AI" takes that have surrounded that acronym for decades.
meindnoch · 6h ago
It's about as cringe as that Chinese guy with the funny-shaped head, who said a few years ago that AI for him means "alibaba intelligence".
Geee · 5h ago
And that's why we haven't heard of him since then.
iambateman · 7h ago
LLM's get six mentions in this article.
mbowcut2 · 7h ago
Nah, I think they made it model agnostic, which is kinda smart.
barbazoo · 6h ago
Search for "large language model" instead of "LLM".
rtaylorgarlock · 6h ago
Because they don't own it, or the models they (don't) own aren't good enough for a standalone brand? Sure seems like it.
That said, I'd think apple would actually be much better positioned to try the WSL1 approach. I'd assume apple OS is a lot closer to linux than windows is.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/...
1. Creating and configuring a virtual machine:
2. Allocating guest memory: 3. Creating virtual CPUs: 4. Setting registers: 5. Running guest code: 6. Handling VM exits:Apple’s stack gives you low-level access to ARM virtualization, and from there Apple has high-level convenience frameworks on top. OrbStack implements all of the high-level code themselves.
Native Linux (and Docker) support would be something like WSL1, where Windows kernel implemented Linux syscalls.
XNU is modular, with its BSD servers on top of Mach. I don’t see this as being a strong advantage of NT.
It's possible that Apple has implemented a similar hypervisor here.
That's their phrasing, which suggests to me that it's just a virtualization system. Linux container images generally contain the kernel.
No, containers differ from VMs precisely in requiring dependency on the host kernel.
Thst's how docker works on WSL2, run it on top of a virtualised linux kernal. WSL2 is pretty tightly integrated with windows itself, stil a linux vm though. It seems kinda weird for apple to reinvent the wheel for that kind of thing for containers.
Can't edit my posts mobile but realized that's, what's the word, not useful... But yeah, sharing the kernal between containers but otherwise makes them isolated allegedly allows them to have VMesque security without the overhead of seperate VMs for each image. There's a lot more to it, but you get the idea.
I know the container ecosystem largely targets Linux just curious what people’s thoughts are on that.
Good read from horse mouth:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
I like to read bibliographies for that reason—to read books that inspired the author I’m reading at the time. Same goes for code and research papers!
Jails are first-class citizens that are baked deep into the system.
A tool like Docker relies using multiple Linux features/tools to assemble/create isolation.
Additionally, iirc, the logic for FreeBSD jails never made it into the Darwin kernel.
Someone correct me please.
Docker isn't providing any of the underlying functionality. BSD jails and Linux cgroups etc aren't fundamentally different things.
Microsoft frequently tweaks syscall numbers, and they make it clear that developers must access functions through e.g. NTDLL. Mac OS at least has public source files used to generate syscall.h, but they do break things, and there was a recent incident where Go programs all broke after a major OS update. Now Go uses libSystem (and dynamic linking)[2].
[1] https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/
[2] https://go.dev/doc/go1.11#runtime
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346/
That’s an interesting difference from other Mac container systems. Also (more obvious) use Rosetta 2.
What seems to be different here, is that a VM per each container is the default, if not only, configuration. And that instead of mapping ports to containers (which was always a mistake in my opinion), it creates an externally routed interface per machine, similar to how it would work if you'd use macvlan as your network driver in Docker.
Both of those defaults should remove some sharp edges from the current Linux-containers on macOS workflows.
The equivalent of Electron for containers :)
They sold Docker Desktop for Mac, but that might start being less relevant and licenses start to drop.
On Linux there’s just the cli, which they can’t afford to close since people will just move away.
Docker Hub likely can’t compete with the registries built into every other cloud provider.
Once you have an engine podman might be the best choice to manage containers, or docker.
I'm the primary author of amalgamation of GitHub's scripts to rule them all with docker compose so my colleagues can just type `script/setup` and `script/server` (and more!) and the underlying scripts handle the rest.
Apple including this natively is nice, but I won't be a able to use this because my scripts have to work on linux and probably WSL
Oh, wait.
https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
That is what I have been using since 2010, until WSL came to be, it has been ages since I ever dual booted.
No comments yet
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It seems like a big step in the right direction to me. It's hard to tell if its 100% compatible with Docker or not, but the commands shown are identical (other than swapping docker for container).
Even if its not 100% compatible this is huge news.
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This sounds like apple announced 2 things, AI models and container related stuff I'd change it to something like:
> Apple Announces Foundation Models, Containerization frameworks, more tools
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
The new foundation frameworks around generative language model stuff looks very swift-y and nice for Apple developers. And it's local and on device. In the Platforms State of the Union they showed some really interesting sample apps using it to generate different itineraries in a travel app.
The other big thing is vibe-coding coming natively to Xcode through ChatGPT (and other) model integration. Some things that make this look like a nice quality-of-life improvement for Apple developers is the way that it tracks iterative changes with the model so you can rollback easily, and the way it gives context to your codebase. Seems to be a big improvement from the previous, very limited GPT integration with Xcode and the first time Apple Developers have a native version of some of the more popular vibe-coding tools.
Their 'drag a napkin sketch into Xcode and get a functional prototype' is pretty wild for someone who grew up writing [myObject retain] in Objective-C.
Are these completely ground-breaking features? I think it's more what Apple has historically done which is to not be first into a space, but to really nail the UX. At least, that's the promise – we'll have to see how these tools perform!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612
Does that explain why you don't have to worry about token usage? The models run locally?
I have the same question. Their Deep dive into the Foundation Models framework video is nice for seeing code using the new `FoundationModels` library but for a "deep dive", I would like to learn more about tokenization. Hopefully these details are eventually disclosed unless someone else here already knows?
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/301/?time=1...
Looks like software UI design – just like fashion, film, architecture and many other fields I'm sure – has now officially entered the "nothing new under the sun" / "let's recycle ideas from xx years ago" stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_%28user_interface%29
To be clear, this is just an observation, not a judgment of that change or the quality of the design by itself. I was getting similar vibes from the recent announcement of design changes in Android.
This was posted in another HN thread about Liquid Glass: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC . I'm sure Apple will tweak the opacity before it goes live, but this looks horribly insane to me.
But I'm not so sure if I want transparent.
[1]: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
Sebastiaan de With of Halide fame did a writeup about this recently, and I think he makes some great points.
https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
Read on and:
They are completely dynamic: inhabiting characteristics that are akin to actual materials and objects. We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
Well worth reading for the retrospective of Apple's website taking a twenty year journey from flatland and back.
Proof of a well-designed UI is stability, not change.
Reads to me strongly of an effort to give traditional media something shiny to put above the headline and keep the marketing engine running.
My only guess is this style looks better while using the product but not while looking at screenshots or demos built off Illustrator or whatever they’re using.
It was too slow and was later optimized away to run off of pre-rendered assets with some light typical style engine procedural code.
Feels like someone just dusted off the old vision now that the compute is there.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
Showing off the pulsating buttons he said something like "we have these processors that can do billions of calculations of second, we might as well use them to make it look great".
And yet a decade later, they were undoing all of that to just be flat an boring. Im glad they are using the now trillions of calculations a second to bring some character back into these things.
A decade later they were handling the windfall that came with smartphone ascendancy. An emergence of an entirely new design language for touch screen UI. Skeumorphism was slowing that all down.
Making it all flat meant making it consistent, which meant making it stable, which meant scalability. iOS7 made it so that even random developers' apps could play along and they needed a lot of developers playing along.
We were in a flat era for the last several years, this kicks off the next 3D era.
The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways to run Linux VMs, but actual, native containers-- macOS containers. And third parties can't really implement this well without Apple's cooperation. There have been some efforts to do this, but the most notable one is now defunct, judging by its busted/empty website[1] and deleted GitHub organization[2]. It required disabling SIP to work, back when it at least sort-of worked. There's one newer effort that seems to be alive, but it's also afflicted with significant limitations for want of macOS features[3].
That would be super useful and fill a real gap, meeting needs that third-party software can't. Instead, as wmf has noted elsewhere in these comments, it seems they've simply "Sherlock'd" OrbStack.
--
1: https://macoscontainers.org/
2: https://github.com/macOScontainers
3: https://github.com/Okerew/osxiec
If the sandboxing features a native containerization system relied on were also exposed via public APIs, those could could also potentially be leveraged by developer tools that want to have/use better sandboxing on macOS. Docker and BuildKit have native support for Windows containers, for instance. If they could also support macOS the same way, that would be cool for facilitating isolated macOS builds without full fat VMs. Tools like Dagger could then support more reproducible build pipelines on macOS hosts.
It could also potentially provide better experiences for tools like devcontainers on macOS as well, since sharing portions of your filesystem to a VM is usually trickier and slower than just sharing those files with a container that runs under your same kernel.
For many of these use cases, Nix serves very well, giving "just enough" isolation for development tasks, but not too much. (I use devenv for this at work and at home.) But Nix implementations themselves could also benefit from this! Nix internally uses a sandbox to help ensure reproducible builds, but the implementation on macOS is quirky and incomplete compared to the one on Linux. (For reasons I've since forgotten, I keep it turned off on macOS.)
https://tart.run
https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli
One clever and cool thing Tart actually does that sort of relates to this discussion is that it uses the OCI format for distributing OS images!
(It's also worth noting that Tart is proprietary. Some users might prefer something that's either open-source, built-in, or both.)
https://devenv.sh/
UV is pretty good for python too.
Do you think people would be developing and/or distributing end user apps via macOS containers?
Read more about it here - https://github.com/darwin-containers
The developer is very responsive.
One of Apple's biggest value props to other platforms is environment integrity. This is why their containerization / automation story is worse than e.g. Android.
Secure Boot on other platforms is all-or-nothing, but Apple recognizes that Mac users should have the freedom to choose exactly how much to peel back the security, and should never be forced to give up more than they need to. So for that reason, it's possible to have a trusted macOS installation next to a less-trusted installation of something else, such as Asahi Linux.
Contrast this with others like Microsoft who believe all platforms should be either fully trusted or fully unsupported. Google takes this approach with Android as well. You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can trivially root a Pixel factory image. And if you're talking about how they will punish you for that by removing certain features: Apple does that too (but to a lesser extent).
https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/RecordingIndicatorUtili...
On many Android devices, unlocking the boot loader at any point will also permanently erase the DRM keys, so you will never again be able to watch high resolution Netflix (or any other app that uses Widevine), even if you relocked the bootloader and your OS passed verified boot checks.
On a Mac, you don't need to "unlock the bootloader" to do anything. Trust is managed per operating system. As long as you initially can properly authenticate through physical presence, you totally can install additional operating systems with lower levels of trust and their existence won't prevent you from booting back into the trusted install and using protected experiences such as Apple Pay. Sure, if you want to modify that trusted install, and you downgrade its security level to implement this, then those trusted experiences will stop working (such as Apple Pay, iPhone Mirroring, and 4K Netflix in Safari, for instance), but you won't be rejected by entire swathes of the third-party app ecosystem and you also won't lose the ability to install a huge fraction of Mac apps (although iOS and iPadOS apps will stop working). You also won't necessarily be prevented from turning the security back up once you're done messing around, and gaining every one of those experiences back.
So sure, you can totally boil it down to "Apple still punishes you, only a bit less", but not only do they not even punish your entire machine the way Microsoft and Google do, but they even only punish the individual operating system that has the reduced security, don't punish it as much as Microsoft and Google do, and don't permanently lock things out just because the security has ever been reduced in the past.
Do keep in mind though, the comparison to Android is a bit unfair anyway because Apple's equivalent to the Android ecosystem is (roughly; excluding TV and whatever for brevity) iPhone and iPad, and those devices have never and almost certainly will never offer anything close to a bootloader unlock. I just had used it as an example of the all or nothing approach. Obviously Apple's iDevice ecosystem doesn't allow user tampering at all, not even with trusted experiences excluded.
Fun fact though: The Password category in System Settings will disappear over iPhone Mirroring to prevent the password from being changed remotely. Pretty cool.
Alternatively, read about iBoot. Haha, just kidding! There is no documentation for iBoot, unlike there is for uBoot and Clover and OpenCore and SimpleBoot and Freeloader and systemd-boot. You're just expected to... know. Yunno?
I wouldn't want a numpad. A track point would be ape.
I struggle with keyboard recommendations b/c I'm not fully satisfied lol.
It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested wasteland. There are so many ads in YouTube and streaming music. I had no idea.
It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need to figure out a better solution for that.
So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming media. Who knew?
[0]: https://kaylees.site/wipr2.html
The majority of the world are using their phones as a computing device.
And as someone with a MacBook and iPad the later is significantly more ergonomic.
They could have gone the direction of just running MacOS on it, but clearly they don't want to. I have a feeling that the only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it more in their walled garden.
I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get, ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary branch.
I think Microsoft was a little too eager to fuse their tablet and desktop interface. It has produced some interesting innovations in the process but it's been nowhere near as polished as ipadOS/macOS.
No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want. Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode - only runs on MacOS.
The changes to window management are great - but iPad and iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
For the same price, you still get a better mac.
In education or corporate settings, where account management is centralized, you want each person who uses an iPad to access their own files, email, etc.
Auth should be Apple Business Manager; image serving should be passive directories / cloud buckets.
Haven’t tried it though, still using JamF.
https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
I dgaf what the UI looks like. It’s fine.
1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled from an iPhone app, and
2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.
Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1. Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those things not immediately chew through your battery.
[0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software lockout.
P4: Foundation models will get newbies involved, but aren't ready to displace other model providers.
P4: New containers are ergonomic when sub-second init is required, but otw no virtualization news.
P2: Concurrency now visible in instruments and debuggable, high-performance tracing avoid sampling errors; are we finally done with our 4+ years of black-box guesswork? (Not to mention concurrency backtracking to main-thread-by-default as a solution.)
P5: UI Look-and-feel changes across all platforms conceal the fact that there are very few new API's.
Low content overall: Scan the platforms, and you see only L&F, app intents, widgets. Is that really all? (thus far?) - It's quite concerning.
Also low quality: online links point no where, half-baked technologies are filling presentation slots: Swift+Java interop is no where near usable, other topics just point to API documentation, "code-along" sessions restating other sessions.
Beware the new upgrade forcing function: adding to the memory requirements of AI, the new concurrency tracing seems to require M4+ level device support.
This doesn’t sound impressive, it sounds insane.
It looks like each container will run in its own VM, that will boot into a custom, lightweight init called vminitd that is written in Swift. No information on what Linux kernel they're using, or whether these VMs are going to be ARM only or also Intel, but I haven't really dug in yet [1].
[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346
[1] https://github.com/apple/containerization
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...
Don’t use macOS but had just kinda assumed it would by virtue of shared unixy background with Linux
Is this the first time Apple has offered something substantial for the App store fees beyond the SDK/Xcode and basic app distribution?
Is it a way to give developers a reason to limit distribution to only the official App Store, or will this be offered regardless of what store the app is downloaded from?
That's... kinda what Apple is famous for.
edit: For those curious, https://youtu.be/51iONeETSng?t=3368.
- New theme inspired by Liquid Glass
- 24-bit colour
- Powerline fonts
I wish I thought that the Game Porting Toolkit 3 would make a difference, but I think Apple's going to have to incentivize game studios to use it. And they should; the Apple Silicon is good enough to run a lot of games.
... when are they going to have the courage to release MacOS Bakersfield? C'mon. Do it. You're gonna tell me California's all zingers? Nah. We know better.
Bad news.
im confused
https://katacontainers.io/
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
Their hardware across the board is fairly powerful (definetly not top end), they have a good API stack especially with Metal. And they have systems at all levels including TV. If they were to just make a standard controller or just say "PS5 dualshock is our choice" they could have a nice little slice for themselves.
very good to see XCode LLM improvements!
> I use VSCode Go daily + XCode Swift 6 iOS 18 daily
Ultimately UI widgets are rooted in reality (switches, knobs, doohickeys) and liquid glass is Salvador-Dali-Esque.
Imagine driving a car and the gear shifter was made of liquid glass… people would hit more grannies than a self-driving Tesla.
I'm assuming this is an updated version of those.
I am excited to see what the benchmarks look like though, once it's live.
https://huggingface.co/apple
No comments yet
I get it, but an iPad starts at $349; often available for less.
At this point, an iPad is no different than a phone—most people wouldn't share a single tablet.
Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-user devices.
It's less about the cost and more about having to have another stupid device to charge, update, and keep track of, when a tablet is not a device that gets used enough by any one person to be worth all that. It would be much more convenient to have a single device on a coffee or end table which all family members could use when they need to do more than you can do on a phone.
> Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-user devices.
Maybe. Probably 90% of work laptops are single-user, I'm sure. But for home computers, multi-user can be very useful. And it's better than ever to use laptops as dumb terminals, since all most people's stuff is in the cloud. It's not nearly as much trouble to get your secondary user account on a spare laptop in the living room to be useful as it was in the Windows XP days. Just having a browser that's signed into your stuff, plus Messages or Whatsapp, and maybe Slack/Discord/etc. is enough.
> most people wouldn't share a single tablet.
Since iPads have never supported doing so in a sane way, that unfounded assertion is just as likely due to the fact that it's a terrible experience today, since if you share one today, someone else will be accidentally marking your messages as read, you'll be polluting their browser or YouTube history, etc.
It's also the kind of dismissive claim true Apple believers tend to trot out when someone points out a shortcoming: "Nobody wants to use a touchscreen laptop!" "Nobody wants USB-C on an iPhone when Lightning is slightly smaller!" "Nobody needs an HDMI port or SD slot on a MacBook Pro!" "Nobody needs a second port on the 12-inch MacBook!" Most of the above things have come true except the touch laptop, and somehow it hasn't hurt anyone, but the "nobody wants..." crew immediately stops when Apple finally [re-]embraces something
Edit: surprised apple is dumping resources into gaming, maybe they are playing the long game here?
How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like installed apps when searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name.
Spotlight is unbelievably bad and has been unbelievably bad for quite a few years. It seems to return things slowly, in erratic order (the same search does not consistently give the same results) and unreliably (items that are definitely there regularly fail to appear in search results).
[0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/macos-tahoe-26-makes-...
Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
…10 Central and Mountain.
Settings → Apple Intelligence and Siri → toggle Apple Intelligence off.
It's not enabled by default. But in case you accidentally turned it on, turning it off gets you a bunch of disk space back as the AI stuff is removed from the OS.
Some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.
Every year, macOS and iPadOS look superficially more and more similar, but they remain distinct in their interfaces, features, etc. But the past 15 years have been "we'll be *forced* to only use Apple-vetted software, just like the App Store!"
And yeah, the Gatekeeper mechanism got less straight-forward to get around in macOS 15, but … I don't know, someone will shoot me down for this, but it's been a long 15 years to be an Apple user with all that noise going on around you from people who really don't have the first clue what they're talking about — and on HN, no less.
They can come back to me when what they say actually happens. Until then, fifteen dang years.
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I’ve read stories about how people were amazed at calling each other and would get together or meet at the local home with a phone installed, a gathering spot, make an event about it. Now it’s boring background tech.
We kind of went through a faze of this with the introduction of webcams. Omegle, Chatroulette, it was a wild Wild West. Now it’s normalized, standard for work with the likes of Zoom, with FaceTiming just being normal.
Now the Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG seems prophetic if turn your head sideways a bit https://chatgpt.com/share/684762cc-9024-800e-9460-d5da3236cd...
AI maximalists are like those 100 years ago that put radium everywhere, even in toothpaste, because new things are cool and we’re so smart you need to trust us they won’t cause any harm.
I’ll keep brushing my teeth with baking soda, thank you very much.
There are lots of folks like this, and it's getting exhausting that they make being anti-AI their sole defining character trait: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistHate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7C6Ezl35A
The ML hype-cycle has happened before... but this time everyone is adding more complexity to obfuscate the BS. There is also a funny callback to YC in the Lisp story, and why your karma still gets incinerated if one points out its obvious limitations in a thread.
Have a wonderful day, =3