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.
Aqara Matter support has been added to two of its existing hubs, which upgrades them to the HomeKit-compatible connectivity standard for smart home devices. Updating the hubs will provide Matter connectivity to much of the company’s product range, including sensors, switches, and plugs.
The company says that Matter compatibility is coming first to two hubs, the Aqara M1S and M2 …
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Privacy and civil rights activists say that a US GDPR-style federal privacy law should be passed to replace the confusing mass of federal and state laws in place at present. This is an approach also favored by Apple, which wants the simplicity of a single set of privacy requirements across the US.
In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides the strongest protections ever seen for consumer data, all within a single piece of legislation. The US, in contrast, has no fewer than eight different federal privacy laws, and a mass of current and planned state ones …
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A Chinese company has filed a lawsuit as it seeks an injunction to stop iPhone production in China, including the upcoming iPhone 13.
Xiao-i (whose full name is Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology Co) previously made an unsuccessful attempt to block sales of all devices with Siri in China, claiming that Apple’s intelligent assistant (IA) violated a “chat robot” patent the company owns …
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The German government has reportedly admitted to buying Pegasus spyware, despite the fact that using some of the functionality would break privacy laws in the country. Privacy is a particularly hot-button issue in the country, given the country’s history.
Sources cited in the report say that the version purchased from NSO had certain features disabled so that its use would be lawful in the country …
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An annual National Privacy Test shows that Germans are the most privacy-savvy of 197 nationalities surveyed, followed by Americans…
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Early last year, Apple applied for a patent for a curved glass iMac design, with one of the illustrations also suggesting the same design could be used for a display and dock for a MacBook.
That patent has today been granted …
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Apple’s return-to-office plans have met with objections from some employees, who want the flexibility to continue working from home full time, but a new poll suggests that the Cupertino company has hit the sweet spot in its proposal for three days a week in the office.
A poll of 1,900 US adults found that this was what the average professional employee considers ideal …
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Analysts expect iPhone sales in India to grow by more than 50% year-on-year, up from under $2B in Apple’s 2019/2020 financial year to around $3B by the end of the current financial year.
iPhone production in India has also increased dramatically since 2017 …
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A new piece summarizing the history of changes to Apple’s App Store rules argues that the company hasn’t changed the strategy it adopted when the store was first launched back in 2008.
The piece echoes my own view that Apple makes the smallest possible changes it believes will deal with each antitrust threat …
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A market intelligence report says that Xiaomi overtook Apple in the smartwatch market during quarter two – though just barely. That left Xiaomi in the No. 1 slot, Apple as No. 2, ahead of Huawei and Fitbit, with Samsung in last place.
The report shows Xiaomi shipping 8M smartwatches during Q2, against 7.9M Apple Watches …
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An Apple job ad reveals that the company is exploring the use of RISC-V chips, an open-source processor tech that competes with the ARM architecture used for Apple’s A-series and M-series chips.
However, while some are suggesting that this points to the company seeking to replace ARM-based processors, that’s an extremely unlikely scenario …
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Update: Gjøvik has advised that she disputes the account presented here. Additionally, some have suggested that my own perspective on this is a male one, and that I cannot know how the same words might be intended or received in regard to a woman. That point is well made; I fully accept it; and accordingly have rephrased below.
A US labor board is investigating two Apple employee complaints, one of which was filed by Ashley Gjøvik, a senior engineering program manager who has made a series of public allegations against the company.
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A USB-C to Lightning cable with a hidden wireless key-logger can enable an attacker to capture everything you type from a distance of up to a mile.
Any tech-literate person knows you should never plug a USB key into any of your devices unless you trust the person giving it to you, but fewer know that the same applies to USB cables …
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The iPhone market share of the global smartphone market fell to 13.7% in Q2, ahead of the iPhone 13 launch later this month. Q2 is historically the slowest quarter for iPhone sales as customers wait for the new flagship models.
The drop put Apple in 4th place, behind Samsung, Oppo, and Xiaomi …
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Apps used by children – defined as any app “likely to be used by children,” even if they are not the target audience – must meet new UK privacy standards from today …
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Smart home device company Eve has been adding Thread support to its product lineup, and the Eve Thermo is the latest HomeKit-compatible device to be updated.
The Eve Thermo is a smart radiator valve that allows you to control the temperature of individual rooms in a variety of ways, including Siri …
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A new report from Korea says that the iPhone periscope lens expected to debut in Apple’s 2023 lineup has hit a snag. Samsung has the most sophisticated technology for those, and Apple wants to use it, but there are patent problems with the optical image stabilization system the iPhone maker wants to include.
Periscope lenses are a way to allow longer optical zoom without having lenses that stick out farther from the phone …
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A new Apple antitrust case has been opened in India, the day after another one ended in Japan. Both cases relate to Apple’s cut of App Store sales.
Apple made a fairly major concession in order to close out the Japanese investigation, albeit one that will apply to a limited number of developers, but the Indian case poses a bigger challenge …
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It appears that Google was inspired by Apple when it comes to the benefits of custom-designed chips. The company had already confirmed that the upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone will have a Google-designed System on a Chip (SoC), and a new report today says that the company is taking the same approach for future Chromebooks.
Google’s decision is said to have been prompted by Apple’s success with its M1 Macs …
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The latest Telegram update gives you “the power to run your own TV station,” says the developer behind the private messaging app …
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A new Philips Hue Spotify integration has been announced, and is rolling out to the Hue app from today. This will sync your color lights to the music you’re playing on Spotify, either fully automatically or with some degree of manual control.
Unlike third-party apps like Hue Disco, the integration doesn’t rely on your iPhone microphone to listen to the music …
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Apple Watch blood pressure measurement has long been rumored, but a Nikkei report yesterday suggested that the feature would be included in the upcoming Series 7 model.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman says not, in a two-word reply to someone querying that on Twitter …
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A survey of Android owners suggests they are less likely to switch to an iPhone this year than they were at the same time last year.
The lack of a fingerprint reader and the CSAM scanning controversy appear to be the two biggest factors in explaining the fall in interest …
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There has been much discussion of a pair of iPhone 13 satellite communications reports, and it now appears that there may have been some degree of misunderstanding in these.
We’d already indicated that this was likely to be an emergency/backup communications system for remote areas only, but some are now going further and suggesting that it doesn’t involve satellites at all…
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