Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer who started his career on PC World and has written for dozens of computer and technology magazines, as well as numerous national newspapers, business and in-flight magazines. He has also written several books, and creates occasional videos.
He is old enough to have owned the original Macintosh. He currently owns an M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro, an M1 13-inch MacBook Air, an iPad mini, an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and multiple HomePods. He suspects it might be cheaper to have a cocaine habit than his addiction to all things anodised aluminum.
He’s known for his op-ed and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review:
He speaks fluent English but only broken American, so please forgive any Anglicised spelling in his posts.
He gets a lot of emails and can’t possibly reply to them all. If you would like to comment on one of his pieces, please do so in the comments – he does read them all.
AI hardware has been in the news this week, with the Apple pin report getting most of the headlines. But there was also a new claim about OpenAI’s upcoming AI hardware device under iO branding.
It’s more than eight months since former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased it, and we’re still no closer to knowing its form factor. The latest report doesn’t exactly help, appearing to contradict what the pair have already said …
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A report yesterday said that we will see a Siri chatbot as part of iOS 27, despite the company previously dismissing this idea.
If accurate, this will see the company adopt a two-stage strategy to finally giving the new Siri the smarts it has long lacked …
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Yesterday brought a surprising report about the development of an Apple pin, which The Information likened to the mysterious and as-yet-unreleased AI hardware device designed by Jony Ive.
I have a pretty strong suspicion about what the Apple pin is, and I’m very confident indeed that I know what it isn’t …
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OpenAI says it is now rolling out ChatGPT age prediction and that it will use this to determine the content you are allowed to see. It’s not immediately clear how this will impact Siri fallback to ChatGPT.
The AI company says that it will use a wide range of signals to guess your age, including your usage patterns over time …
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Even traditional video-on-demand services are no longer safe, it seems: Netflix vertical video is coming later this year.
The company started testing the idea more than six months ago, and one of its co-CEOs has now confirmed that the move is going ahead …
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There’s been considerable confusion about the fate of the iPhone 18 Pro Dynamic Island, with conflicting claims about the position of the selfie camera, the visibility of the Face ID components, and the size and location of the Dynamic Island.
One recent report seemed to leave open the possibility that the upcoming device wouldn’t even need a Dynamic Island, but a reliable source has now stepped in to clarify the position …
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A Californian court has awarded Apple a partial victory in a class action lawsuit alleging that the company violated the privacy of some iPhone owners.
The case followed a security researcher discovering data collection practices by Apple which he described at the time as “shocking” …
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Leaker Fixed Focus Digital gained credibility for being one of the first to report the iPhone 16e naming, and continues to insist that an iPhone Air 2 will launch this year despite contradictory reports.
In a new Weibo post today, they double down on a claim made last month and add a little more detail …
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Late last year, a Reddit post caused something of a furore. A user posted a photo of their Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro that had turned pink. A few other examples followed.
However, while you should continue to follow Apple’s advice on how to avoid this, tests have shown it’s unlikely to happen accidentally …
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Amazon has long offered the ability to sync ebooks with their audiobook equivalent, a convenient option for those who prefer to read when sitting down but like to continue with the book while on the move. Spotify is currently testing a feature called Page Match, which can pull off the same trick with paper books …
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Apple’s Mac icons in Tahoe have come under fire from quite a few people. Adjectives that have been applied to them include terrible, awful, amateurish, dumbed down, and objectively bad.
With the announcement of Apple Creator Studio, the company has gone even further in terms of minimal icons for its creative apps, provoking further controversy …
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In an annual tradition, Apple is celebrating Martin Luther King Jr Day on its homepage, with quotes from the civil rights champion.
This year’s featured quote is “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” …
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One of the biggest visual changes we’re expecting with this year’s iPhone 18 Pro is a punch-hole selfie camera, with the Face ID module invisibly embedded into the display.
Until recently, we’d been expecting this to be centered in the same way as the current camera and Face ID module. However, one report has suggested that the punch-hole selfie camera would instead be relocated to the top-left corner, where the clock currently lives. If so, logically the Dynamic Island would move with it, and this is shown in a new video render …
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We’re likely less than two weeks away from the launch of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models. Performance estimates based on extrapolating from the difference between the base M4 and the more powerful variants suggests that the M5 Max MacBook Pro could deliver “astounding” Geekbench scores.
The analysis suggests that the M5 Max chip may be the first Apple GPU ever to break 250,000 on the Geekbench 6 compute test …
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A new market intelligence report suggests that Threads is now more popular than X on iPhone and Android, although X still has a strong overall lead when web usage is taken into account.
Separately, the controversy over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images – including CSAM – has intensified, as xAI is now being sued by the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children …
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In the space of one week, we have seen the transformation of our expectations for the new Siri. Instead of having to wait for Apple to catch up with OpenAI and Google, we now need only to wait for the company to tweak the existing Gemini models.
While that is indeed a dramatic turnaround, we still shouldn’t expect overnight miracles from the new Siri whenever it does now launch …
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The long-awaited launch of the new AI-powered Siri now looks much closer thanks to Apple’s partnership with Google. The company this week confirmed reports that many Siri features will be powered by Google’s Gemini models.
We already knew some of the features we could expect from AI Siri thanks to the announcements at WWDC 2024 and a now-deleted iPhone 16 ad – and the launch of Gemini Personal Intelligence has now effectively provided a working preview …
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EU antitrust legislation forced Apple to allow third-party app stores for iPhone within the bloc, with MacPaw’s Setapp Mobile one of the first to take advantage of this.
The company has now announced that it is closing its iOS store, citing “still-evolving and complex terms.” Apple would likely argue that the EU is responsible for constantly moving goalposts without clearly specifying how it wants the company to respond …
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The US was one of a number of countries to escape recent Spotify price increases, but that is now coming to an end.
The streaming music service increased the price of its premium plans in a large number of other countries late last year, while US pricing remained unchanged. Predictably, that was only a temporary respite …
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Wikipedia is today celebrating its 25th birthday, but its long-term future has never been less certain due to a range of threats with the potential to become a perfect storm …
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A new report on Apple’s partnership with Google to have Gemini power the new Siri appears to confirm speculation that the iPhone maker is paying around a billion dollars a year for the deal.
It also claims that ChatGPT provider OpenAI made a conscious decision to decline the opportunity to provide the intelligence behind Siri …
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It’s been close to a decade since I first started being grumpy about subscription apps. I did acknowledge the benefits right from the start, including giving many developers a more sustainable income, but expressed my unease about where we were headed.
A few years later, I voiced doubts as to whether it was a sustainable business model. But the trend has continued to grow, with Apple Creator Studio the latest example …
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At this point, I kind of have to feel sorry for Roblox. The company came under increasing criticism for failing to adequately protect children, and then courted even greater controversy when it started requiring children as young as nine years old to submit a video selfie for age verification.
The latest development in the saga is that the age verification process appears to be failing badly, with the company saying that you can’t expect everything to work on day one …
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I still have affectionate feelings about the original Macintosh I owned back in 1984, and if you feel the same, you can now give your iPhone 17 Pro a nostalgic makeover …
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