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.
paxys · 2h ago
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 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
In case you're wondering, the Hypervisor.framework C API is really neat and straightforward:
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 · 1h 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
literalAardvark · 51m ago
Exactly. So it wouldn't necessarily be easier. NT is almost a microkernel.
pjmlp · 7m ago
It is as native as any Linux cloud instance.
petersellers · 1h 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 · 46m 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 · 18m ago
> Linux container images generally contain the kernel.
No, containers differ from VMs precisely in requiring dependency on the host kernel.
tensor · 2m 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.
jzelinskie · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
No comments yet
darkwater · 9m ago
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
enceladus06 · 12m ago
WSL throughput is not enough for file intensive operations. It is much easier and straightforward to just delete windows and use Linux.
pjmlp · 8m ago
WSL 1.0, given that WSL 2.0 is regular Linux VM running on HYPER-V.
msgodel · 1h ago
If they implemented the Linux syscall interface in their kernel they absolutely could.
vips7L · 52m ago
Aren't the syscalls a constant moving target? Didn't even Microsoft fail at keeping up with them in WSL?
koito17 · 4m 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].
Not Linux syscalls, they are a stable interface as far as the Linux kernel is concerned.
NewJazz · 52m ago
They didn't.
bandoti · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
McAlpine5892 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
formerly_proven · 1h 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 · 5m ago
With a whole generation forgetting they came first in big iron UNIX like HP-UX.
LoganDark · 1h ago
I wonder if User-Mode Linux could be ported to macOS...
wmf · 52m ago
It would probably be slower than just running a VM.
WhyNotHugo · 12m 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.
thde · 42m 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.
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.
rnubel · 37m ago
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.
marviel · 2h 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.
cmiles74 · 1h 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.
samgranieri · 1h 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
mgreg · 1h ago
There's also Rancher Desktop (https://rancherdesktop.io/). Supports moby and containerd; also optionally runs kubernetes.
jbverschoor · 1h ago
Orbstack
underdeserver · 2h ago
The CLI sure looks a lot like Docker.
WD-42 · 8m ago
Should be easy enough, look for the one with upstream contributions from Apple.
Oh, wait.
acedTrex · 1h ago
Colima is my guess, only thing that makes sense here if they are doing a qemu vm type of thing
mbreese · 1h 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.
DrBenCarson · 1h ago
Orbstack has been pretty bulletproof
No comments yet
wmf · 1h ago
They Sherlocked OrbStack.
12_throw_away · 8m 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 ...
ale · 50m ago
That's a good thing though right?
dang · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 16m 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 · 1h ago
Small nitpick but "Announces" being capitalized looks a bit weird to me.
Me too - I thought I'd fixed that! Fixed now, thanks.
codethief · 2h ago
> New Design with Liquid Glass
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 · 1h ago
To me it looks more like Windows Vista's "Aero" than OS X's "Aqua".
buildbot · 1h 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.
hbn · 1h ago
I love that we're getting some texture back. UI has been so boring since iOS 7.
Sebastiaan de With of Halide fame did a writeup about this recently, and I think he makes some great points.
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 · 2h 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 · 51m ago
Same. And white on light blue is just as bad. Looks like I’ll be using more accessibility features.
summarity · 1h ago
The last example in the first carousel is the worst, the bottom glass elements have complete unreadable text
spike021 · 1h 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 · 2h ago
I love it. Reminds me of Windows 7. The nostalgia is too strong with this one.
breadwinner · 45m 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.
ordinaryradical · 2h 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.
Barrin92 · 41m 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.
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.
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 · 9m ago
[delayed]
NewJazz · 49m ago
What would these be useful for?
wpm · 42m 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 · 38m 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 · 26m 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.
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 · 27m ago
Orchestrating macOS only software, like Xcode, and software that benefits from Environment integrity, like browsers.
teruakohatu · 7m ago
> 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?
chakintosh · 2h 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.
burntalmonds · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
NewJazz · 49m ago
Or maybe a stand and separate keyboard. Better ergonomics than a laptop that way with similar portability.
Karrot_Kream · 5m ago
Any keyboard you recommend? I'm looking around myself.
ZeroTalent · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
thetallguyyy · 48m ago
Because MacBooks have subpar displays, at least the M4 Air does. The iPad Pro is a better value.
paxys · 2h 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.
renrutal · 24m 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!
athenot · 1h 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.
losvedir · 1h 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 · 32m 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.
jeron · 2h 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 · 2h ago
The new windowing feature basically cannibalizes MacBook Air.
threetonesun · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
msgodel · 1h 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 · 2h ago
Does an iPad allow for multiple users?
crooked-v · 2h ago
Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough.
thimabi · 53m 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 · 56m 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 · 45m 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.
browningstreet · 1h ago
Then why break it off as iPadOS?
m3kw9 · 2h ago
I told that to John Gruber and he said never will happen
jonplackett · 1h 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.
pjmlp · 4m ago
WebKit is also being swiftified, as mentioned on the platforms state of the union.
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.
antipaul · 3m ago
With a single toggle, you can turn off Apple Intelligence
See (System) Settings
jw1224 · 2h ago
If that’s the one reason, have you considered just… not using the AI features?
doublerabbit · 2h ago
Sure you can for now. But what when it's forced upon you to use them?
jw1224 · 53m ago
Well if that hypothetical situation ever happens, you can just switch to Linux then.
sph · 39m ago
Why do you care if they switch now?
vouaobrasil · 2h ago
I find it offensive to have any generative AI code on my computer.
dkdcio · 1h ago
I promise you there is Linux code that has been tab-completed with Copilot or similar, perhaps even before ChatGPT ever launched
vouaobrasil · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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....
reaperducer · 29m 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.
azinman2 · 1h ago
So, then don’t do that? It’s not like it’s automatically generating code without you asking.
vouaobrasil · 1h 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.
echelon · 2h 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 · 24m 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.
vouaobrasil · 2h ago
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 · 37m 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.
Joel_Mckay · 1h 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
nehalem · 2h ago
I wonder what happened to Siri. Not a single mention anywhere?
dewey · 1m ago
That was almost the first thing they mentioned in the Apple Intelligence section.
m3kw9 · 2h ago
hope to show you more later this year. was like the first thing they said about apple intelligence
mohsen1 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Isn't it still impossible to run any dev tools on the iPad?
robterrell · 52m 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 · 43m ago
You can’t run Docker on an iPad.
visiondude · 2h 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.
lenerdenator · 2h 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 · 1h ago
yeah, getting better LLM support for XCode is great!
esafak · 1h ago
Does this mean we will longer need Docker Desktop or colima?
bandoti · 1h 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.
dblooman · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1m ago
Several years ago XCode also had “jump to definition” and a few other features.
elpakal · 3h 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 · 9m ago
The api looks like "give it a string prompt, async get a string back", so not tied to any particular UI Framework.
datadrivenangel · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Swift != SwiftUI
N_A_T_E · 1h ago
> New Design with Liquid Glass
Yes, bringing back aqua! I even see blue in their examples.
minimaxir · 2h ago
They also just announced that Shortcuts can use these endpoints (or Private Cloud Compute or ChatGPT).
babyshake · 1h 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 · 1h 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
dorian-graph · 1h ago
Will they ever update Terminal.app?
garciasn · 1h 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 · 59m 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 · 1h ago
Also ghostty
bitpush · 2h 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.
digianarchist · 2h ago
iPadOS and OSX continue to converge into one platform.
xattt · 2h ago
Calling it: Apple allOS 27 incoming next year, with Final Cut Pro on your Apple Watch.
No comments yet
rconti · 2h ago
Multi-user iPadOS when?
xp84 · 1h 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 · 36m 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.
olyjohn · 1h ago
Never, it'll be single user MacOS.
simonw · 2h ago
Is there a beta we can install to try out these models yet?
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?
turnsout · 3h 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.
amluto · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Quicksilver worked great back in the day before Spotlight was ever even a thought.
busymom0 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
User: yells Feedback into void.
retskrad · 2h 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 · 2h ago
This just in: company that spends billions on marketing is effective at marketing their products. News at 11.
reaperducer · 22m ago
News at 11.
…10 Central and Mountain.
sabareesh · 2h ago
Good move, not sure they are exposing other modalities as well ?
visarga · 2h ago
I guess LLM and AI are forbidden words in Apple language. They do their utmost to avoid these words.
simonw · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
And that's why we haven't heard of him since then.
iambateman · 2h ago
LLM's get six mentions in this article.
mbowcut2 · 2h ago
Nah, I think they made it model agnostic, which is kinda smart.
rtaylorgarlock · 2h 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.
barbazoo · 2h ago
Search for "large language model" instead of "LLM".
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:Native Linux (and Docker) support would be something like WSL1, where Windows kernel implemented Linux syscalls.
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.
No comments yet
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
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...
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.
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.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346/
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.
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.
No comments yet
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
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
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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I dgaf what the UI looks like. It’s fine.
See (System) Settings
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
very good to see XCode LLM improvements!
> I use VSCode Go daily + XCode Swift 6 iOS 18 daily
Bad news.
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.
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.
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.