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.
The iPhone 17 event is finally official with the slogan “Awe dropping,” taking place on Tuesday, September 9.
We’re expecting Apple to announce either six or seven new devices, alongside some possible new iPhone cases and Watch bands too …
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Apple is doubling its retail footprint in India with the imminent opening of two new stores next week, one in Bengaluru and the other in Pune.
As usual, the company is offering downloadable wallpaper to celebrate the openings, this one with a peacock theme …
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Apple is engaged in legal battles in both the UK and the US over 4G patents used in its mobile devices. The company has applied for permission to appeal a UK verdict which would cost it an additional 13 cents per iPhone.
While this might sound crazy, the company says that very much more is at stake, not just for its own business, but for companies of every size …
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Earlier this year, we spotted signs of a Logitech MX Master 4 in the works, replacing the 3S, and we subsequently got a closer look at it. Now a new report says it will include haptic feedback …
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Historical precedent suggests that the latest iOS 26 beta may be the final one, and therefore the version that will be released into the wild next month.
But while the stats may favor this, not everyone is convinced that beta 8 is ready to be unleashed. Given that there’s now very little time left before the iPhone 17 launch, is iOS 26 good enough … ?
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Earlier this year, we saw an Apple Music tool intended to make it easier to switch from Spotify, and that tool is now available in more countries, including the US.
But wait! Are you sure you really want to do that when Spotify has just rolled out its very latest feature? Direct messages …
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One feature that has been available for a number of years on Android has long been expected to come to iPhone too: reverse wireless charging. A leaker yesterday suggested that it’s coming to the two iPhone 17 Pro models.
If true, this would be good news for three reasons, but there is reason to suggest that may not be possible – due to MagSafe …
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My colleague Michael Burkhardt posed an interesting question earlier in the week: if you had to start again with your Apple kit, what would you buy?
There’s already one Apple product category I no longer use, and a second one I use only on a technicality …
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Apple’s Vision Pro is a very nice piece of kit, but the $3,400 price means that even CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged it’s a niche product, and the 600g plus weight also means many find it uncomfortable to wear for longer than an hour.
Chinese brand Vivo has attempted to address both issues in a design which looks remarkably like a direct copy of Apple’s spatial computer …
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The most annoying thing about X is, well, X – but the company has at least fixed an app behavior many of us found frustrating.
Just 18 years after users started complaining about it, X’s head of product said that a fix is now rolling out …
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A former Meta product manager has claimed that the social network circumvented Apple’s privacy protections, as well as cheating advertisers, and fired him when he repeatedly raised the issue internally.
Meta is said to have found ways to identify Apple users even after they refused consent for app tracking, in order to avoid an estimated $10 billion loss of revenue …
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The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) carried out a record number of phone searches of travelers arriving at, or returning to, the US in the last quarter.
The legal position on these searches is unclear when it comes to US citizens, but there are steps you can take to protect your privacy …
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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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