The M1 MacBook Air just dropped to an extremely affordable $749 from its $999 MSRP. If you need a lightweight laptop with excellent battery life that can handle everyday tasks like a champ, don’t miss this deal.

This is the lowest price the machine has dropped to, besting even the price it was available for during last year’s Black Friday. Best Buy has the same deal, knocking $250 off the M1 MacBook Air.

There’s nothing like stained wood to make a computer setup look like a class act. Today’s featured M1 Max MacBook Pro and custom PC workstation places those powerful machines on shelves off to the side that more-or-less match the desk.

Relocating the computers makes more room on the beautiful wooden desktop, which ups the quality even further with a handsome wooden desk shelf for the external display and other items.

Apple TV+ just gave us the first real look at Ridley Scott’s upcoming biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. The Napoleon trailer dropped Monday, showing Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor setting out to conquer Europe.

The film tells the story of Napoleon’s ruthless rise to power and his obsessive love for his wife, Empress Josephine.

This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: Apple’s roadmap for future AirPods looks ambitious. The company wants them to take your temperature to see if you’re feverish, test your ears to see if you’re hard of hearing, substitute for hearing aids, and charge using the one cable to rule them all … USB-C!

It’s all music to our ears.

Also on The CultCast:

• An Apple monitor that works even when your Mac is turned off sounds perfect for some people and situations.
• Shocker! Apple’s Vision Pro headset might be in incredibly short supply at launch.
• Threads, the new “Twitter killer” from Meta, doesn’t seem like that much of a threat. However, it might play nice with Mastodon. (Griffin is optimistic!)
• Suddenly, Apple TV+ seems like a streaming contender.
• Erfon is pretty, pretty, pretty pleased with Apple’s stock price.

Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video live stream, embedded below.

The Galactic Empire and the Foundation prepare for massive conflict in a new trailer for Apple TV+ show Foundation, with the sci-fi series’ gorgeous special effects and cinematography very much on display.

Foundation season two premieres July 14. So now’s the time to watch the epic trailer Apple released Thursday — or get caught up on season one.

Threads is the new social media platform with Twitter-like features, coming from Instagram. As on Twitter, you can make short text posts with a few attached images or video, write replies, quote posts, repost them, etc. But you’re not starting fresh again: You sign in with your Instagram account and instantly access the same network of people who you follow and all your followers.

Since Twitter’s slow-burn downfall began last year, a few hot new replacements have been propped up, with varying degrees of staying power. Mastodon is the open-source, volunteer-driven network that courted the nerdy types in the tech community — but no one else. Bluesky, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has been scaling slowly on an invitation system. Post, T2 and countless others were the fashion of the day but burned out fast.

Threads has three great things going for it: It’s incredibly easy to join, it’s built off your existing network of friends, and it’s very simple to use. If you liked Twitter, you’ll like Threads. While I don’t like Threads as much as Mastodon, its future interoperability with the open-source alternative means we can all be happy on whatever service we choose and stay in touch.

Apple TV+ dropped the official trailer Wednesday for its upcoming historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon. The sprawling period piece is filled with the rage and bloodshed of one of America’s most-enduring murder mysteries.

Based on a nonfiction account of a deadly conspiracy by white men to capture oil wealth held by the Osage Indian nation members in early-1900s Oklahoma, the Marin Scorsese film counts Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert De Niro among its sprawling cast.

Providing a first-look image (above), Apple TV+ said Friday its expansive sci-fi series Invasion will return for season 2 before the end of the summer.

Aliens resume battling humans on August 23. Are you ready?

Players become students at Hogwarts and engage in magical duels against dark wizards in Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, which launched Tuesday. It’s a collectible card (CCG) and massively multiplayer (MMO) game, and is free to play — with in-app purchases.

There are versions for iPhone and iPad. (Android too.)

The first screenshots and videos of apps being built for Vision Pro show just how easy it is to port iOS apps to Apple’s upcoming augmented reality headset.

Apple just released the visionOS software development kit last Wednesday, and already people are refitting their iPhone apps for Apple’s new mixed-reality platform and sharing the results online.

The apps include Broadcasts, which lets you tune in to internet radio and livestreams — and leave a little Now Playing window anywhere in your virtual space. With cooking app Crouton in visionOS, you can place timers all around your kitchen. And Tasks, a powerful to-do app, works exactly as it does on your Mac and iPhone.

In my opinion, this is what will ultimately make visionOS succeed where similar mixed-reality platforms failed: It builds heavily on the same technologies that underpin iOS. If you can build an iPhone app, you can build a Vision Pro app.

Here’s a gallery of what some popular indie apps look like running on Vision Pro.