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.
We know for sure that Apple will increase iPhone prices when the iPhone 18 Pro launches next month. The company exempted existing iPhones when it increased prices across the board to reflect higher memory prices, but that was only ever going to be a temporary reprieve.
However, two sources are now suggesting that the starting price of this year’s Pro models will be $1,399 – and I find it hard to believe even Apple would go that far …
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While it’s been reported that Apple is debating whether or not the camera in its upcoming glasses product should allow users to shoot photos and videos, DuckDuckGo is going one step further …
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What seems like a deliberately vague comment by outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook during the earnings call suggests that heavy Siri AI usage could be more expensive than we’ve so far expected.
While it had always seemed clear that we wouldn’t be able to make unlimited use of Siri AI without paying for it in some way, Cook’s remarks do appear to point to some bad news …
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Apple’s cautious entrance into the smart glasses field means that we have a reasonably good idea what to expect, and have been able to preview some of the capabilities through existing devices.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses have given me two years’ experience of the kind of capabilities we’re expecting from the first Apple Glasses model, and the Even Realities G2 are currently giving me a preview of what we can expect from a later model: smart glasses with a display …
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Apple will today announce its earnings for its fiscal Q3 ending in June, with the usual Q&A with analysts following immediately afterwards. It follows the company briefly hitting a $5 trillion market cap before slipping back slightly.
Today will be the final earnings call with Tim Cook as CEO, and analysts aren’t expecting any surprises – but there will be one very big question …
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Romance scams are one of the oldest cons in the online world, but they continue to pull in new victims all of the time. Joint research by four universities suggests that AI chatbots are now even better at carrying out these scams than humans, and that’s a pretty scary prospect …
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Jony Ive and Sam Altman have been teasing an AI hardware device for a long time now, and it’s increasingly looking like that tease was premature. We’re still not expecting to see a launch until some point next year.
OpenAI continues to be exceedingly vague about what form its first hardware device might take, but an interview yesterday seems to point to something rather like a HomePad …
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The ability to add a digital version of your driver’s license to your iPhone looks like it will be rolling out to a 15th US state before too long.
Apple currently lists 14 states where the capability is supported, alongside the territory of Puerto Rico, and backend assets now indicate another one will soon be added …
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The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) estimates that online scams cost Americans almost $150 billion last year – seven times the amount reported to the FBI.
The organization says that the number of cyber scams is increasing dramatically, and that most victims never report their losses to law enforcement …
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Warner Bros has announced that it is inflicting testing a new format on select iPhone users in the US: HBO Max Shorts. As if vertical video weren’t bad enough, the media giant has says that the clips are powered by an AI tool …
A prototype smart ring developed by engineers at the University of California appears to have cracked one of the holy grails of health wearables: non-invasive blood sugar measurement. The data is sent to a companion app on a paired iPhone.
While existing smart rings rely purely on biophysical data extracted from sensors like those embedded into the Apple Watch, this ring also tracks chemical biomarkers by analysing sweat …
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Apple today officially announced its Apple Upgrade leasing program, and it works in the way we expected. While it does make products more affordable on a monthly basis, it leaves people at risk of being trapped into a never-ending lease cycle.
That’s because, unlike the iPhone Upgrade Program it partly replaces, you don’t own the device outright at the end of the term …
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Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is likely to make a number of changes when he takes over in September, but it’s clear that the company’s loss-making Apple TV streaming service will be safe from any shake-up …
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We’ve long cautioned against disclosing sensitive personal data in AI chatbot sessions, given that most companies use these as training data, but there’s now an even bigger reason.
Things got way worse over the weekend when Redditors discovered that you could access some Claude AI chats through a simple Google search …
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The upcoming MacBook Ultra was never going to be cheap, with an all-new sleeker design, OLED, and touchscreen – even before the price increases driven by higher memory costs. A new report now suggests the manufacturing cost could be pushed yet higher
Apple typically likes to have multiple suppliers for components in order to maximize the reliability of display and allow it to negotiate the best possible prices, and it had hoped to do so for the MacBook Ultra. However, a supply chain source says Apple has decided to use just one display supplier …
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Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and the latest cheaper non-designer option are sold on the basis of the built-in AI features, but in early July the company announced a “ridiculous” limit on the free usage you can make of an accessibility feature.
Effectively, Meta has retroactively applied a paywall to a hardware product it already sold to customers. Update: The social network has now said it is “pausing” plans to paywall the feature – see the end of the piece.
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Security researchers demonstrated that Claude Cowork could escape the sandbox intended to control the access it gets to your Mac. The exploit, dubbed ShareRoot, could allow an attacker to read and write files stored anywhere on your Mac, as well as access login credentials for online services.
Around half a million Mac users had co-work sessions exposed, and some still remain vulnerable to the exploit today …
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A Bloomberg report suggests that Apple Glasses might be launched without the capability to take photos or record video. Apple is said to be considering this option as a way to address privacy concerns.
However, while I do absolutely understand the thinking that would leave the company to mull this option, my own experience of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is that video recording is absolutely core functionality for this type of product …
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AppleCare One – a version of AppleCare+ that allows you to protect multiple products for a single monthly payment – is rolling out the the UK.
Additionally, AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss protection is also expanding from iPhone only to iPad and Apple Watch too …
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Mention of a new Apple Card feature in iOS 27 brought to mind a banking app feature I recently had to enable after discovering it was not on by default.
This too relates to automatically recurring card payments, and it turned out not to work in the way we might expect it to …
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The exact launch timings of the iPhone Ultra remain unclear as a new supply chain report says that Foxconn is making “final adjustments” to the manufacturing process. It follows an earlier report stating that mass production had begun.
Recent reports indicate that Apple will unveil the new folding iPhone at its September event, but that initial availability may be limited …
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You’d think that it would be obvious that it’s a terrible idea to ask an AI chatbot for a medical consultation, but hundreds of millions of people do it every week.
In one near-death example now the subject of a lawsuit, ChatGPT advised a pastor to ignore symptoms of a pulmonary embolism – a condition with a mortality rate of 30%. In fact, the advice it offered very likely made things worse …
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One of the reported reasons for Apple taking such a long time to introduce a folding iPhone is that the company was unhappy with the very visible crease and vulnerability of earlier generations of flexible screens.
Display partner Samsung finally solved this to Apple’s satisfaction, and the launch of the Korean company’s latest folding smartphone has now provided a preview of what we can expect from the iPhone Ultra display …
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Apple devices were long known for having some of the highest-quality LCD screens in the business, and that remains the case for today’s MacBooks. The company upped the ante first through retina displays and then mini-LED backlighting. This is the reason Apple has been in no great hurry to adopt OLED technology.
It has, however, been making a phased transition to OLED. Apple first introduced the display tech with the Apple Watch, followed up with iPhone and iPad models, and the MacBook Pro is next in line for the upgrade …
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