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.
A Doordash data breach has exposed the personal data of an unspecified number of customers, including name, phone number, email address, and physical address.
The food delivery company says that it has implemented a number of security measures in response, including reporting the attack to law enforcement …
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The EU’s landmark privacy law, GDPR, was one of the best things to happen to the internet for a very long time. But it also came with one of the most annoying things on the web: a never-ending series of pop-ups asking us to make cookie choices …
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Back in the Intel days, the Mac Pro was the computer many of us lusted over even if we had no possible justification for actually buying one. It was by far the most powerful Mac and the easiest to upgrade – not to mention one of the most beautiful machines the company ever made.
The 2023 Mac Pro was even more gorgeous than its predecessor, but with the radical new architecture of Apple Silicon, the writing was already on the wall …
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With a growing number of legislators wanting to set limits on the use of social media apps by teenagers and children, TikTok is hitting back.
The company argues – with an apparently straight face – that new features like an affirmation journal, background sound generator, and app badges are likely to be more effective …
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Huge chunks of the internet were completely unavailable yesterday, with many other websites and services experiencing slow performance. It was immediately clear that the problem was with the Cloudflare network, but it took some time for the company to establish the true cause.
Cloudflare says that it initially believed it was experiencing a massive cyber-attack, but subsequently realized the problems were caused by a “painful” error with a software update …
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Update, 7:11 p.m. ET: A Meta representative reached out to 9to5Mac and provided the following statement:
“We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information. We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.”
A massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed the phone number of almost every user on the planet – despite the fact that parent company Meta had been alerted to the vulnerability way back in 2017.
Security researchers were able to use what they described as a “simple” exploit to extract a total of 3.5 billion phone numbers from the messaging service …
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Apple has today announced the most popular podcasts of 2025 through a comprehensive set of charts, which include the most popular episodes and most shared shows.
The iPhone maker’s editorial team has also put together its own curated selection of what it considers to be the best shows of the year …
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A new market intelligence report suggests that the iPhone 17 lineup is selling incredibly well in China, despite this being a somewhat tricky market for Apple.
It reveals that one in every four smartphones sold in China during October was an iPhone, and that total sales beat the previous record set back in 2021 …
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It’s not just the Twitter brand name that is no more – direct messages are also being replaced by X Chat. The new private messaging feature finally brings end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the platform – though with one question-mark …
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Way back in 2009, Apple added a very handy feature to iMacs, allowing them to be used as a monitor for another Mac – typically a MacBook. Known as Target Display Mode, the company unfortunately dropped the feature from the model launched in late 2014 and it has never returned.
If you want to do the same with later iMacs, there is an app for that, as we outlined last year. But Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs opted instead for the ultimate conversion …
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There’s been a whole flurry of rumors about a 2nd-gen iPhone Air lately. It’s getting a second camera; it’s been delayed to allow time to add this; it’s been indefinitely delayed due to the original model proving unpopular; it probably won’t be getting a second camera but will be getting an updated chip.
Whenever there are this many conflicting reports, the smart money is on nobody outside Apple really knowing what’s going on. But if the second camera report is true, that leaves another question to be answered …
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There’s long been speculation about when Apple CEO Tim Cook might retire and who is likely to replace him. That intensified earlier this month when he turned 65.
Cook himself has made only two on-the-record statements, but a new report over the weekend suggests that the company is now ramping up preparations to replace him “as soon as next year” …
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The iPhone’s Portrait mode uses computational photography to simulate the shallow depth of field of a digital SLR or mirrorless camera with a larger sensor. It’s evolved from a very crude tool into something which is now pretty convincing, but it’s still no substitute for the real thing.
There are some circumstances in which you can get genuine shallow-ish depth of field with an iPhone shot, but these are very limited as we’ll discuss. The Sandmarc 2x telephoto lens is a much more practical way to get true optical blurring when shooting portraits …
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Some 2 billion email addresses and 1.3 billion passwords have been compromised in a series of data breaches highlighted by a cybersecurity company.
Microsoft regional director Troy Hunt, who runs the site Have I Been Pwned, says the stolen data is more extensive than anything the site has ever processed …
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Apple was today denied permission to appeal the result of a billion-dollar lawsuit filed by UK app developers accusing the company of abusive commission levels.
The company last month lost the case and a hearing today is deciding how the damages are calculated. If the ruling stands, it is expected to end up costing Apple anywhere between £1B and £2B ($1.3B to $2.6B) – but Apple is expected to counter this with four arguments …
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The leaker who first revealed the name of the iPhone 16e is now saying that demand for the device has been very low. However, they say that despite this setback, Apple is for now still planning to proceed with plans for the iPhone 17e.
They also say that production of the iPhone Air has now ceased completely, following an earlier report that output levels had been slashed …
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Update 9:34am PT: There is no direct deal between Apple and Tencent for the 15% commission rate on WeChat mini games and apps. Instead, Tencent is taking advantage of Apple’s new App Store Mini Apps Partner Program, which launched for all developers today. Tencent, like all developers, will first have to apply to the program.
Members of the program earn 85% of qualifying In‑App Purchase sales within qualifying mini apps.
The original story via Bloomberg is below.
Apple’s App Store commission might be under threat in multiple countries around the world, but the company has just gained a huge new source of commission thanks to a WeChat deal struck in China.
The situation arises because the way most Chinese iPhone users buy apps is very different to anywhere else in the world …
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Apple’s opposition to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) antitrust legislation took a turn back in September when the company started arguing that the law should be repealed. It also suggested that more new features would be delayed for EU customers, and perhaps even new hardware.
The company is now claiming a new study proves that the DMA fails to live up to one of its core promises: reducing app prices …
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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was infamous for his harsh critiques of the work of his team. Hardware or software, if Steve wasn’t 100% happy, you would certainly know about it.
Chris Espinosa, who wrote the first Macintosh calculator app and still works at Apple as its longest-serving employee, found a creative way around Steve’s never-ending critiques in what must be one of the best ever examples of managing upwards …
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Apple has updated its website to say that Apple Intelligence on a Mac requires a model with an M2 chip or later. That’s a change to the original compatibility requirement of an M1 chip or later.
However, while the change may be worrying for anyone with an M1 Mac, it seems near-certain that this is an error rather than a change of requirements …
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While Apple’s decision to include a bold orange colour in the iPhone 17 Pro lineup seems to have proven surprisingly popular, there was one design element that attracted more criticism: the two-tone look of the back casing.
A leaker with a decent track record suggests that the company is going to fix that problem in next year’s lineup …
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You wouldn’t imagine that buying an iPod could remain a memorable part of a trip in which I fulfilled a childhood dream, and yet that is the case.
November 2001 saw me fly from London to New York on Concorde, and it was during my five-day stay that the original iPod first went on sale …
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It’s been a couple of years since Snapchat made the shift to 3D avatars. The company said at the time that it gave users more ways than ever to represent themselves. Two years later, the complaints kept coming, so following a petition 2D avatars are now being reintroduced …
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Some owners of first-generation AirPods Max headphones have reported experiencing “the three amber lights of death.” This is when the headphones fail to connect and a standard reset doesn’t resolve the problem.
While the headphones might appear to be bricked, as this indicates a hardware failure, there are a couple of potential solutions which may at least keep them going for a while …
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