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.
Amazon Fire tablets have so far been cheap and cheerful devices, often bought for children. Running a heavily-customized version of Android known as Fire OS, they haven’t achieved much traction in the market …
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More than 370,000 Grok AI chats have been published on the Grok website and indexed by search engines, making them public.
In addition to the interactive chats themselves, Elon Musk’s xAI company also published photos, spreadsheets and other uploaded documents …
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Two of Verizon’s mobile plans are getting some upgrades at no additional cost. The improvements are being made to the Simple Mobile and Total Wireless plans.
All five of the Simple Mobile tiers are being upgraded, while the same is true of the top two Total Wireless levels …
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It’s proving a very long wait for the new Siri, but perhaps it doesn’t matter so much after all. A new survey shows that most people are using Siri and other voice assistants in exactly the same way they did way back in 2018.
While some new capabilities have been added, and there are some generational differences in usage, the vast majority of it falls into five rather basic categories …
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If you prefer to do your own repairs of Apple devices or to use independent shops, then it’s now easier to do so in Canada.
Apple has today brought its self-service repair and genuine parts distributor programs to the country …
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A random report from an account with zero track-record for anything claims that the iPhone 18 will drop the Camera Control button as too few people are using it.
The claim is entirely meaningless, but I strongly suspect that it’s right in one respect: that hardly anyone is using the feature …
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Indie content platform Substack now lets you subscribe to newsletters, podcasts, and video channels via an in-app purchase.
However, while this removes friction from the subscription sign-up process, you definitely shouldn’t use it, for two reasons …
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A new report says that Apple will finally hit a long-held goal to reduce its dependence on China with the launch of the iPhone 17.
Indian iPhone production has always lagged behind that of China, but all this is now changing – with import tariffs acting as an additional incentive …
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I’m a big fan of dictation and voice commands. The latter are the most common way for me to control my smart home, and I dictate a lot of my messages and other short pieces of text.
Apple’s built-in dictation features have certainly improved over the years, but trying out the third-party app Aqua Voice shows just how much better it could be if Apple really tried. Indeed, I actually wrote the entirety of this piece using Aqua Voice dictation …
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If you were holding a competition for the scummiest business model, then data brokers would be very high up the list. These companies make money by buying personal data from app and website owners and selling it to companies who want to spam us.
A US Senator has now drawn attention to the latest sketchy practice by these companies: making it harder for us to opt out by hiding that option from search results …
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Apple has today previewed its latest retail store ahead of its opening on Saturday. As usual, the company has created a funky new wallpaper to celebrate the opening, and made it available for download.
The store design mirrors what we have seen in other recent mall openings: a curved frontage with lots of glass, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior …
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Yesterday’s Bloomberg report on Apple’s upcoming tabletop robot didn’t reveal anything new about the hardware, but plans to give it a personality could represent a huge gamble.
The starting point seems both uncontroversial and a great idea – basing the UI on the friendly Finder icon that we’ve known and loved since the welcome screen of the original Macintosh back in 1984 …
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We were already expecting higher iPhone prices this year, but it now seems that one of the four models will get a bump in storage in return.
That’s always welcome, of course, but a move Apple made two years ago already made it irrelevant to me …
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No, I get it: round watches are a very inefficient use of space, and there is likely a reason that the Apple Watch continues to dominate the market.
But what a new piece argues for is not to replace the existing Apple Watch design, but instead to offer us a greater range of options …
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One of the downsides of tech giants creating Silicon Valley was the affordable housing crisis it spurred. That has made it next to impossible for those on typical salaries to rent or buy in the area.
Apple was one of a number of tech companies which pledged to help out back in 2019, and so far has delivered more than most …
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The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is one of the most valuable free services available on the web, ensuring that important sources of information are protected from the vicissitudes of fate and tech companies.
Until recently, the archive was able to capture the entirety of Reddit, but that is no longer the case following new restrictions implemented by the for-profit community discussion platform …
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A leaker last month indicated that the iPhone 17 Air would get a “binned” version of the A19 Pro chip, with only five graphics cores instead of six.
They’ve today reiterated this, affirming another of the compromises buyers will have to make if they want Apple’s slimmest ever iPhone …
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Fortnite returned to the App Store in the US back in May after a federal court ruling, and is now set to return to iOS in Australia through the Epic Games store after a similar judgment there.
While Epic Games celebrated the ruling, the fate of the app in other countries still remains far from certain – and its availability in the US may be temporary …
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The Matter standard – which brings HomeKit compatibility to a far broader range of devices – is getting a significant upgrade.
The latest version will enable the production of lower cost HomeKit-compatible smart home devices, as well as slicker control over your existing ones …
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iOS 26 is giving us a glass-like UI, but Apple’s long-term vision for the iPhone hardware is what former design chief Jony Ive referred to as a “single slab of glass.”
A new Apple patent application appears to refer to work on this, describing a “six-sided glass enclosure” …
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We learned back in June that Apple is working on a new entry-level MacBook, to be powered by the A18 Pro chip rather than an M-series processor. This would be the first time the company has ever offered a MacBook below $999.
A new supply-chain report says that the first stage of production is scheduled to begin sometime next month, with full-scale manufacturing potentially in progress by the end of the year …
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A leaker with a decent track record has backed reports of higher pricing for the iPhone 17 line-up compared to the iPhone 16, but says that Apple will be cushioning the blow somewhat.
The iPhone 16 Pro starts at 128GB flash storage, but the base iPhone 17 Pro is said to offer 256GB storage – effectively a $100 value …
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One of the bullet points in Apple’s announcement of its increased US manufacturing spend made a big, but very non-specific, claim. Apple said that it was working with Samsung on an “innovative new technology which has never been used before anywhere in the world.”
Although the company was being mysterious, we likely know what that means – and it’s great news not just for the iPhone 18, but also for future iPhones beyond it …
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There have been a number of reports of senior AI researchers leaving Apple, and the latest of these indicates the problem may be bigger than previously known.
One AI recruitment company has suggested there is a crisis of confidence within Apple, with tech rivals now considering it open season on poaching the company’s engineers …
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