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.

A dozen “best-in-class” apps and games took honors in the Apple Design Awards Monday at WWDC23. Winning development teams hailed from around the world, delivering innovative apps with great design, Apple said.

“Apps and games are integral to how we live, work, and play. At Apple, we love to recognize outstanding developers whose apps reflect incredible creativity and design excellence,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

Apple is souping up the systems for entering text into iPhone with iOS 17. Autocorrect is getting enhanced with AI for fewer typos, as part of multiple improvements to what Apple calls “intelligent input.” And Dictation is getting a boost that promises more-accurate voice recognition, too.

I tested the changes in the first iOS 17 beta. Here’s how well they work … so far.

How does Apple’s new “spatial computing” platform visionOS work exactly?

At WWDC23 this week, Apple detailed a bunch of interesting tidbits about how the new Vision Pro headset works. Apple detailed how buttons look and behave in the spatial computer, how they are pressed without any physical controls, and how apps work in 3D.

Here’s how Apple’s spatial interface works.

Sharing your contact information and more with people will get easier with new AirDrop functionality in iOS 17. A new feature called NameDrop makes it about as simple as knocking iPhones together.

“Today, you either hand your phone to them, or one of you dictates your information while the other types it. Now there’s a better way,” said Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi during Monday’s WWDC23 keynote. “Now you can just bring your phones close together.”

Along with macOS Sonoma and its new features will come Safari 17, the new iteration of Apple’s web browser. It brings an enhanced browsing experience with an even greater emphasis than before on privacy, and most changes will probably apply to iOS and iPadOS, as well.

The changes aren’t terribly glamorous, but beefed-up Private Browsing protects against prying eyes online and off, in addition to some other security enhancements.

And in terms of organization, the new Profiles feature helps you keep separate parts of your life separate and website apps keep your favorite sites at your fingertips.

During their WWDC23 keynote, along side the introduction of iOS 17, Apple also previewed their new Journaling app. In line with previous rumors and expectations, the app is designed to make it simple to quickly capture a wide range of aspects about your day.

First impressions of the Vision Pro headset make it sound like Apple absolutely nailed both the industrial design and the overall “experience” of wearing a mixed-reality headset.

Apple didn’t let most reporters go hands-on (or rather “heads-on”) with the new device following the Vision Pro’s unveiling at Monday’s WWDC23 keynote. However, the company’s handlers let some members of the media into a private area to gawk at the Vision Pro — and a handful of people actually got to strap one on.

The very first glimpses reveal hardware that looks far better than the competition, paired with a compelling visual experience, and triggers only a few negative reactions.

People might be squawking about the $3,499 price tag of Apple’s new Vision Pro headset, but let’s put things in perspective. When Apple introduced the Macintosh — the first computer with a graphical user interface — it cost an eye-watering $7,400 in today’s dollars.

The Apple II — the first truly “personal computer’ — proved even more expensive. In 1977, an Apple II with maxed-out memory (a whopping 48KB of RAM, yes kilobytes) cost the equivalent of $14,400.

All that makes the $3,499 price tag of Apple’s new Vision Pro VR headset seem like a relative bargain. It packs insane 4K OLED screens to mesmerize your eyes, an outside screen that shows your face while wearing it, and an array of sensors to capture your hand movements, facial expressions and more.

If Apple is right, and the headset represents the dawn of a new era of 3D spatial computing, then 3,500 bucks isn’t so much to be at the cutting edge. New technology is always pricey … and it could have been even worse. Given the amount of new tech involved, and the high price of nearly a decade of development, the Vision Pro could have been even more expensive. It’s no $10,000 Apple Watch Edition!

The Keynote from WWDC23 was unusually jam-packed with huge announcements. Naturally, the first official details of new iOS, macOS, iPadOS and watchOS versions came to light, as is traditional. But Apple also used its annual developer conference to take the wraps off quite a bit of hardware.

And CEO Tim Cook used Apple’s classic “One more thing” line to unveil Vision Pro, the augmented-reality headset that was the absolute star of Monday’s Keynote.