Computers & Linux News

The biggest MacBook Air is a welcome upgrade for older eyes like mine.

With excellent steak and seafood recipes for as little as $8 or $9 a serving, Blue Apron hits the sweet spot for meal kits in 2023.

Apple has announced a new operating system for its Vision Pro headset. Called visionOS, the operating system has been designed from the ground up for spatial computing and will have its own App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps and compatible iPhone and iPad apps. The Verge reports: The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces. The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset -- a feature Apple calls "EyeSight." It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset. It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You'll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies -- Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show. Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote. The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you're wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "Users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona -- a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques -- which reflects face and hand movements in real time." You can learn more about Apple's first spatial computer here. A dedicated page for the Vision Pro headset is also now available on Apple.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new watchOS 10 feature will monitor sunlight time, which may be important for kids' eye development. Plus, Apple reminds you to keep your screen away from your face.

You can finally use Find My to find a lost Siri Remote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has made a tiny bit of progress in the last year when it comes to getting games running on Macs -- titles like Resident Evil Village and a recent No Man's Sky port don't exactly make the Mac a gaming destination, but they're bigger releases than Mac users are normally accustomed to. For getting the vast majority of PC gaming titles running, though, the most promising solution would be a Steam Deck-esque software layer that translates Microsoft's DirectX 12 API into something compatible with Apple's proprietary Metal API. Preliminary support for that kind of translation will be coming to CodeWeavers' CrossOver software this summer, the company announced in a blog post late last week. CrossOver is a software package that promises to run Windows apps and games under macOS and Linux without requiring a full virtualized (or emulated) Windows installation. Its developers announced that they were working on DirectX 12 support in late 2021, and now they have a sample screenshot of Diablo II Resurrected running on an Apple M2 chip. This early DirectX12 support will ship with CrossOver version 23 "later this summer." The announcement is simultaneously promising and caveat-filled; getting this single game running required fixing multiple game-specific bugs in upstream software projects. Support will need to be added on a game-by-game basis, at least at first. "Our team's investigations concluded that there was no single magic key that unlocked DirectX 12 support on macOS," CodeWeavers project manager Meredith Johnson wrote in the blog post. "To get just Diablo II Resurrected running, we had to fix a multitude of bugs involving MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross. We anticipate that this will be the case for other DirectX 12 games: we will need to add support on a per-title basis, and each game will likely involve multiple bugs." In other words, don't expect Steam Deck-esque levels of compatibility with Windows games just yet. There are also still gameplay bugs even in Diablo II Resurrected, though "the fact that it's running at all is a huge win."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company showed clips of Avatar 2 and announced Disney Plus would be available on its $3,499 headset.

Apple's latest operating system announced at WWDC has many new features but you'll need a fairly recent Mac to run it.

A $3,499 price tag pays for a lot of high-end hardware, including two Apple processors and high-res displays.