Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro. Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple's mixed-reality headsets. Apple released the headsets to the public in February, and they've largely been a commercial flop. But practitioners in some industries, including architecture and medicine, have been testing how they might serve particular needs.

It's hard to know whether this performative strain in tech culture reflects something essential about the industry. Maybe its leaders are just unusually visible, because the legacy media are more interested in them, or because they figure so prominently on the social-media platforms that they operate. Or maybe a few outlier personalities--Musk in particular--are responsible for most of the soap-opera vibes. It could also be the general cultural atmosphere. Over the past 20 years, a fashion for aggrieved and confrontational behavior has migrated out of reality television into the wider entertainment and business worlds, and also into politics, in the person of Donald Trump. If the tech titans weren't so self-serious, their bad behavior might simply blend into this broader coarsening.

Apple has set the dates for WWDC 2023, which will run between June 5th and June 9th. It's still an online-only affair, but there will be a "special experience" at Apple Park on the 5th for developers and students. While we expect to see software-centric upgrades, with iOS, macOS and the rest, this could also be when Apple finally debuts its mixed-reality headset. Rumors suggest it could be called Reality Pro or Reality One, and it's believed to be a standalone device with an M2 chip, dual 4K displays, advanced body tracking and controller-free input. It could be a pricey piece of hardware, even by Apple's standards, with some reports suggesting it'll cost $3,000. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

Microsoft has made big changes to how it operate under Nadella. SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Build 2017 kicks off Wednesday morning in Seattle, a homecoming for the tech giant after years of holding its annual developers conference here in San Francisco. Some 5,500 developers have heeded the Redmond, Wash., company's call, helping Build sell out in a day. As Facebook, Apple and Google do with their big developer confabs, Microsoft will use the event to evangelize about its strategy while urging software pros to spend time developing much-needed apps for Microsoft's ecosystem. Chat-bots were the big story out of Build 2016 -- CEO Satya Nadella pronounced the artificial-intelligence helpers "the new apps" -- but famously fizzled out of the gate when, days before the conference, hackers turned Microsoft's Tay bot into an epithet-spewing racist.