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.
President Biden’s second State of the Union address called on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation on both antitrust and data privacy issues.
His comments on the antitrust issue specifically referenced the need to prevent tech companies favoring their own products, an accusation frequently levelled at Apple …
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We may soon see entirely new iPhone browsers available, as both Google and Mozilla anticipate the end of Apple’s insistence that all iOS browsers use the same WebKit engine as Safari.
This will enable new versions of Chrome and Firefox to offer greater feature differentiation, and for the first time allow them to aim for faster performance than Safari …
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Five new WhatsApp status and reaction updates have been announced by the company, including the ability to limit your audience, and what Meta says was the most-requested new feature …
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An Apple patent granted today appears to describe a new approach to under-screen Face ID, which could also allow the company to embed additional sensors into an iPhone display.
The patent seemingly describes an evolution of the Dynamic Island approach, but applied in a more flexible way …
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Apple chip designer Tim Millet implied in a new interview that annual updates – or something close to this – are likely to be the norm for future Macs.
He talked about the company’s original goals for the development of the M1 chip, and how Apple is approaching work on each successive generation of Mac chip …
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Could Apple be planning a new iPhone Ultra, costing even more than the Pro Max? That’s the suggestion of a report over the weekend, and it may be backed by a hint dropped by CEO Tim Cook in last week’s earnings call.
Asked about the company’s continued push to drive up the average selling price (ASP), Cook said:
Expand Expanding CloseThe iPhone has become so integral into people’s lives. It contains their contacts and their health information and their banking information and their smart home and so many different parts of their lives, their payment vehicle and – for many people. And so I think people are willing to really stretch to get the best they can afford in that category …
Yesterday saw a Twitter API U-turn by the company’s owner Elon Musk, after he had said that the code powering both third-party twitter clients and automated posting bots would no longer be freely available.
Separately, a new report says that even the most common and easily-detected Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) remains on the platform after Musk vowed that removing it was his #1 priority …
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Pegasus spyware journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud were the first to discover an extensive list of specific people being targeted by NSO’s clients. In working on the story, they said they had to take extreme privacy precautions to avoid their own devices being compromised.
One of the major uses of Pegasus has been to silence journalists working on revealing abuses by tyrannical governments, so the risk of their own devices being hacked without their knowledge was very real …
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Two of China’s biggest smartphone retailers are offering iPhone 14 discounts equivalent to well over $100 – a level of price cut usually restricted to older handsets.
One analyst estimates that sales of the four iPhone 14 models were some 28% lower than those of the iPhone 13 line-up at the same point …
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While Apple earnings were even worse than analysts had expected, AAPL investors were only temporarily spooked. At the time of writing, the stock has been mostly hovering right around yesterday’s closing price, and is currently heading up.
Aftermarket trading saw the stock initially drop 5%, but it quickly recovered after CEO Tim Cook explained the three reasons for the fall in year-on-year iPhone revenue …
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A developer has reverse-engineered Instagram’s source code to find what appears to be clear signs that Meta is preparing to offer paid Instagram verification – with the same code also found in the Facebook app …
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Apple pulled Damus from the App Store yesterday, with the developers being informed that the Nostr app “includes content that is illegal in China.”
Apple had previously rejected the app from all its App Stores, and for the same nonsensical reason …
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The new HomePod is now available on apple.com, and in Apple Stores. For those who pre-ordered, the first deliveries are starting to arrive – though many are reporting delays.
Early reviews have generally been positive, with most saying the audio quality and soundstage are very similar to the original despite a reduced number of tweeters …
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The AAPL Q1 2023 earnings call is scheduled for 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET, when the iPhone maker will reveal the key numbers for the all-important holiday quarter: Oct-Dec 2022.
As has been the case since the start of the pandemic, Apple has not offered any guidance on what to expect, so we’re left with analyst estimates for now – and they are not optimistic …
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A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called on both Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app stores.
The demand follows growing concerns about the Chinese-owned app, with the video sharing app already banned from US federal government devices, along with those in more than half of US states …
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The US Batterygate lawsuit resulted in Apple agreeing to pay up to $500M to settle the case, but an equivalent case in South Korea has been dismissed – for what the plaintiff’s lawyers say are unfair reasons.
Both cases relate to Apple’s decision to throttle the performance of older iPhones with fading batteries, in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns. The problem was not what Apple did, but how the company did it …
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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has celebrated the arrival in the App Store of the first Nostr iPhone app, Damus.
Dorsey described the launch of the app as “a milestone for open protocols,” effectively for the creation of a new generation of social tools that are free from big tech control …
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A new report commissioned by the White House has further added to the App Store antitrust pressure, concluding that the control exerted by both Apple and Google results in inflated prices for apps, as well as potentially diminishing innovation.
It effectively backs the changes introduced in proposed antitrust legislation that saw bipartisan support in Congress, but not enough to make it into law …
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When former Apple design chief Jony Ive left the Cupertino company to set up his own design agency, the big question was what he would choose to create when he was free to accept commissions in any field. Some of the answers have proven surprising, and no less so today …
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Anker has admitted that its statements about Eufy security camera encryption were not accurate. The smart home brand had previously stated that all video footage is end-to-end encrypted, but has now admitted there was an exception to this (which it has now fixed).
The company only finally came clean about the privacy breach after The Verge threatened to post a story about the company’s failure to answer its questions …
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An Apple Maps privacy bug fixed in iOS 16.3 may have allowed apps to collect user location data without permission.
At least one app appears to have done so, and a security reporter has speculated that the same privacy bug could have been exploited by countless apps over an unknown time period …
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I’ve noted before the way that gallium nitride (GaN) chargers are a game-changer in terms of how much power can be delivered from a compact power brick – and the Chargeasap Zeus takes this to a whole new level.
It’s a highly portable charging brick that delivers a massive total power output of 270W – with up to 140W from a single port – and its supplied ultra-compact international plug adapters make it a really convenient travel option …
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Instagram Notes – a short status message that floats above your profile and disappears after 24 hours – has now launched in Europe and Japan, and is rolling out to all users in the US. The feature was previously available to a limited number of US users …
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The number of Spotify paying subscribers passed 200 million for the first time in the last quarter. The company added 10M new subscribers to hit 205M paid accounts, and 489M in total. However, the company – which has almost never posted a quarterly profit – saw a dramatic increase in its quarterly loss, year-on-year …
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