> M1 mac runs aarch64 containers natively, and emulates x64 containers Macs don't run any containers natively, because macOS doesn't support containers and doe

> M1 mac runs aarch64 containers natively, and emulates x64 containers Macs don't run any containers natively, because macOS doesn't support containers and doesn't have a Linux ABI translation layer (some operating systems, like Illumos and NetBSD, do, and you can run Linux binaries on them almost like you can run Windows binaries on Linux via WINE). On M1, when you run aarch64 containers under Docker, you are 'merely' emulating an environment for a Linux kernel to run in and you can pass certain aspects of your CPU through. But when you do the same with x86_64 containers, you are additionally 'emulating' (via a translation layer) x86_64. Hopefully some day macOS will have its own truly native containers, like Linux and Windows do. That could be a serious savings for containerized macOS development environments, because they will be way more efficient than Docker Desktop on Mac currently can be. For now, the only way to get that kind of efficiency is Nix— which is great and better suited to that use case than Docker, but underutilized at many organizations. Probably even then people will still use virtualized Linux, since that's a closer environment to where apps will usually run in prod. But at such an org I'd argue for using macOS containers for local development, should they ever come to be available. The efficiency gains are well worth it IME.