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.
Strong sales of the iPhone 14 helped TSMC increase its third-quarter revenue by 48%, at a time when other chipmaking companies are suffering.
There have been fears that rising inflation and interest rates would dampen demand for the iPhone 14, but this appears not to be the case …
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I’ve said before that I was unlikely to use the iPhone 14 Pro 48MP resolution personally, and indeed I stuck to 12MP during a recent trip. But I was of course still curious to see how much of a difference the megapixel count makes in real-world photos.
My tests did lead me to change my mind to a small extent – so now I’d say that I’d expect to use the 48MP capability on extremely rare occasions, rather than never …
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It seems Meta is having problems persuading even its own employees to don one of its virtual reality headsets and use its primary metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. So much so that an internal memo says the company would “hold managers accountable” for their teams using it.
It’s one of a set of leaked memos that suggest Apple may not have too much to fear from Meta’s competition to its own upcoming VR/AR headsets …
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For severely disabled people, it’s no exaggeration to say that Apple Accessibility transforms lives – but it can be difficult to appreciate the impact that even minor-sounding changes can make until you see it for yourself.
Colin Hughes is a former TV producer and now disability campaigner who kindly showed me around his home to see how he uses both Accessibility features and HomeKit control to maximize the independence he retains over his daily life …
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Apple has reminded customers about iPhone 14 Plus availability, with the larger version of the base model on sale in Apple Stores tomorrow, October 6.
It follows reviews landing this morning, in which those who got early access praised the great battery life of the final model to go on sale following last month’s launch …
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One of the differences between the base and Pro model iPhone 14 this year is that only the latter get the latest A16 chip. But a new piece today argues that this is a smaller difference than Apple might like to suggest.
A comparison of the two chip designs concludes that the differences are far more limited than is normally the case for Apple’s annual iPhone chip upgrade …
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The Fast Company website is finally back after being taken completely offline for eight days. The drastic action was in response to an attack which saw obscene and racist alerts pushed to Apple News.
The hackers said that unbelievably poor password security made multiple systems easy to access …
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Season one of the Elon Musk Twitter saga drew to a close yesterday when the billionaire announced that he would proceed with his promised purchase, and the company accepted.
But there’s much more to come, of course, even if there is no surprise twist. The latest fun begins with banks starting to sweat over the terms of their own involvement…
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On paper, Apple US manufacturing operations doubled between 2020 and 2021 – but the likely reality is that the vast majority of US production is carried out on a small scale, for test purposes.
The number of US manufacturing sites among Apple’s suppliers increased from 25 to 48 in the course of a year, according to the company’s latest supplier list …
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Some AirPods and Beats headphones are to be made in India for the first time, as Apple continues a gradual reduction of its dependence on China for product manufacturing.
AirPods production is predominantly split between Foxconn and Luxshare, and a report today says that Apple has instructed both companies to move some of their assembly work to India …
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Analysts have given conflicting views on iPhone 14 sales, but lead assembly partner Foxconn has reported a new monthly revenue record on the back of “storming” iPhone 14 Pro demand.
The company said that it is positive on the outlook for the current quarter, though remains cautious about the potential impact of continuing supply chain issues and inflation …
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Samsung chipmaking plans revealed today suggest that the company may be hoping to compete with TSMC for Apple’s A-series and M-series chip business.
The Korean company is not only targeting 3nm processes and beyond, but also plans to make these new advanced chips in the US …
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An iPhone 14 Action Mode test put the new feature up against the current leading action cam, the GoPro Hero 11.
It’s not a fair fight, of course. The iPhone 14 has to do it all, while the GoPro only has to do one thing well – but it’s still interesting to see where the iPhone held up against the competition, and where it didn’t …
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Apple’s App Store revenue fell by 5% year-on-year in September, with games revenue down by 14%, according to Sensor Tower analytics.
Morgan Stanley, which carried out financial modeling based on the data, said that this was the biggest drop seen since it first started tracking, back in 2015. The fall is likely explained by two factors …
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An Apple and Amazon antitrust investigation in Italy last year found both companies guilty of price-fixing, fining them $225M. Both companies appealed, and a court has now cancelled the fines.
The basis of the decision has not yet been announced, and Apple had not commented at the time of writing …
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If you have the dream of working for Apple, you can’t get much more help than the company’s CEO telling you exactly what the company looks for when hiring.
Tim Cook says that they seek out five traits, and have found that a very good formula when it comes to new hires …
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We don’t yet know exactly what Apple has planned for the upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro model, but Macworld has been doing some speculating, based on extrapolating from the M1 journey.
It suggests that next year might see the release of an M2 Extreme chip, to power a new Mac Pro …
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A new report reveals that Pegasus spyware was used in Mexico after the president expressly said that the government no longer used the malware.
It was used to capture data from the phones of two journalists specialising in reporting on government corruption, as well as a prominent human rights defender …
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The Dynamic Island UI seen in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max was the end result of years of discussion, revealed Apple VP of Human Interface Design Alan Dye.
Software engineering head Craig Federighi said that the new user interface was biggest change to iOS since those required for the iPhone X …
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We imagine no 9to5Mac reader needs to be told to use two-factor authentication (2FA) security wherever possible, but how do you know which websites support it … ?
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Exposure to a massive amount of self-harm content on both Instagram and Pinterest played a key role in the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, concluded an inquest.
Executives from both social media companies have admitted that the teenager was exposed to material she should not have been able to see, and apologized for the failings …
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The Korean antitrust authority has carried out a dawn raid on Apple offices in the city of Gangnam-gu. The raid was part of an investigation into claims that Apple effectively charges some developers even more than the 30% cut, which has itself come under fire.
The same issue also sees small developers subjected to an effective commission of 16.5%, instead of Apple’s claimed 15% small business rate …
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We’ve been talking for many years about both the need and the difficulty of reducing Apple’s dependence on China, and Bloomberg’s research division has now put some estimated numbers on it.
The research suggests that moving just 10% of Apple production out of China would take around eight years …
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Long-range wireless power has been a long-term dream, where a single charger in a single location in our home, can beam power to all of our portable devices. That simply isn’t possible given existing technologies, but smart lock company Alfred has now turned one small part of the dream into reality.
However, rather than use RF energy – which has been the main approach to date – the company has instead turned to infrared …
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