I apologize if this sounds like a hot take, but "Apple developer circles," as in, people who use XCode at all and care about any part of Apple's toolchain[0], is a very small number of people compared to "All developers who happen to code on Macs." In my experience at least, the typical developer who uses macOS codes in VSCode on JS, Python, etc., groans when some file association accidentally launches XCode, and would likely prefer to use normal Docker like the do on their Linux servers, rather than proprietary Darwin weirdness.
"Apple developer circles" to me means the few mostly indies who build non-electron Mac apps and non-ReactNative ios apps, but those developers mostly are writing client code and don't even touch servers.
All this said, my above "gut feelings" don't explain why Apple would have bothered spending their time making this when Orbstack, Docker, etc. already meet the needs of the developers on Mac who actually need and use containers.
[0]: besides the "Command line tools" that allow compilation to work, of course.
> All this said, my above "gut feelings" don't explain why Apple would have bothered spending their time making this when Orbstack, Docker, etc. already meet the needs of the developers on Mac who actually need and use containers.
Before Orbstack, running Docker on Macs was a total pain - the official desktop app is so awful, I doubt anyone at Docker is actually using it. Nevertheless, it was still too useful to let it pass. It was time either Docker or Apple stepped up, but they are both 10 years late to this party. Orbstack fixed the problem.
It would be interesting to see the reaction from Danny Lee, he's hanging out on HN sometimes. I hope this framework ends up being a building block, rather than outright competition.