This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: The first impressions of Apple’s just-unveiled Vision Pro headset leave us mind = blown. Still, no matter how vivid the VR is … or how flawless the visionOS user interface is … or how “natural” the headset looks to be … can anything justify its $3,499 price tag?

Also on The CultCast:

• The load of new Macs showcased at WWDC23 left us surprised — and just a little perplexed. Who exactly is the Mac Pro for?
• The iPhone’s voice recognition receives marginal improvements in the first iOS 17 beta, and that gives us hope for the future.
• Marquee features aside, iOS 17 brings a ton of tiny, thoughtful improvements.
• The tally is in for last week’s WWDC23 predictions. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

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!)

With Safari Profiles, Apple takes another swing at helping us organize all the browser tabs we have open. The new feature lets users put tabs and tab groups into separate areas, helping keep work and our personal lives from interfering.

Beyond that, Safari Profiles also could enable two or more people to more easily share the web browser, which can be a huge benefit for iPad users.

I’ve been testing the new feature in the first betas of iOS 17, macOS Sonoma and iPadOS 17, all of which Apple unveiled at WWDC23 this week.

Apollo, a popular third-party Reddit client for iPhone and iPad, will shut down on June 30. This is due to Reddit’s upcoming API policy that goes live on July 1, which makes it untenable for third-party apps to operate.

Apple highlighted Apollo multiple times on-stage at WWDC23 and even showed it as one of the apps for its Vision Pro headset.

At WWDC23, Apple said it’s adding a slew of new health features in iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and watchOS 10 that will help you take care of yourself physically and emotionally.

And while new mental health and vision features are coming across platforms, the more-general Health app finally arrives on iPad, as well.

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The just-launched Diablo IV is not available for macOS, which angered many Mac gamers. Turns out, one of those people is actor Whoopi Goldberg.

The frustration stems from the fact that previous titles in the long-running game series from Blizzard have supported Mac.

Private Browsing mode in Apple Safari will soon get even more secure. It’ll be locked against someone else accessing it, and incorporate new tools to prevent websites from tracking users.

The additional privacy features are coming in iOS 17, macOS Sonoma and iPadOS 17, all of which were unveiled at WWDC23 this week.

Apple’s redesigned 13-inch MacBook Air from 2022 remains among the best portable laptops you can buy. The 15-inch MacBook Air packs the same benefits in a slightly bigger form factor.

So, which MacBook Air model is right for you — 13-inch or 15-inch? Read our comparison to find out.

The $3,499 price of Vision Pro, the long-awaited AR/VR headset Apple rolled out at WWDC23, startles some people. You can find audience reaction videos out there with audible gasps when the price was announced (including among Apple employees, some posts claim). And mainstream headlines are joining in, too.

And of course social media hasn’t let up on the jokey memes. See below for a few choice examples.

A stealth announcement at WWDC23 is that Apple has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to port PC games to the Mac. A new Game Porting Toolkit “provides an emulation environment to run your existing, unmodified Windows game,” says Aiswariya Sreenivassan — a GPU, graphics and displays software engineer at Apple.

It’s a big gap to clear, which is why the Mac has been left behind in recent years. PC games are compiled for the Intel x86 architecture that the Mac just finished moving away from. The unified Apple silicon architecture bears little resemblance to the standard gaming PC with discrete graphics cards and memory. Apple’s Metal 3 library is very different from DirectX, Unity, Unreal and Vulkan — the usual suspects across the computing pond.

Apple’s new tools could open the floodgates for Mac ports of popular PC games. According to a game engine programmer I spoke with, the Game Porting Toolkit demo is “really impressive.” If the tools work as well in practice as in Apple’s demo, they “would be incredibly useful,” said the developer, who works for a major game developer and asked to remain anonymous.

Making regular, reoccurring payments will soon be a feature of Apple Cash. This will make the payment system useful for rent or allowances or other financial transactions that happen each week or month.

Plus, the system will be able to automatically bring in more money when needed.