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.
A Chinese leaker with some track record has posted images of claimed circuit diagrams of the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models.
These suggest that the new A20 Pro chip may have seven GPU cores – one more than its predecessor – and a faster memory interface …
Expand Expanding Close
A new market intelligence report suggests that Apple will be paying four times more for iPhone 18 Pro memory than it did for last year’s model.
TrendForce says that Apple won’t be passing on the full impact to customers, and will be increasingly looking to Services revenue to offset higher hardware manufacturing costs …
Expand Expanding Close
Syncing your Philips Hue lights to your TV display used to be a rather expensive undertaking, at $385 for the company’s Sync Box 8K. A couple of new products now bring that cost down to as little as $120.
Additionally, you can now integrate Nanoleaf wall panels into your Philips Hue ecosystem thanks to a new $40 Wall Light Module …
Expand Expanding Close
Elon University has partnered with The Washington Post to conduct what turned out to be a worrying survey about Americans viewing AI chatbots as virtual friends or therapists.
The results very much vindicate Apple’s careful decision to ensure that Siri AI doesn’t encourage such pseudo-relationships …
Expand Expanding Close
Greenpeace says the adoption of AI poses the biggest threat to Apple’s environmental track record, and argues that how the company responds will be the “defining test” of whether it really means what it says.
Apple’s environmental achievements to date have been unrivalled, but the massive data center demands created by Siri AI and other Apple Intelligence features could change all of that …
Expand Expanding Close
Multiple Dropbox users have been emailed by the cloud storage company to advise them that a security breach saw unauthorised access to their account. Update: the company has said that about 5,000 accounts were compromised, with files downloaded from around 1,500 of them.
The root cause appears to be a lack of authentication by Dropbox when attackers created a single sign-on option through a third-party company …
Expand Expanding Close
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is reportedly investigating identity theft as digital scans of more than 153 million driver’s licenses went on sale on the dark web. Additional documents offered through a massive security breach include medical cards, residence cards, and more.
The licenses belong to people in the US and Canada, and appear to have been collected by hacking an identity verification service …
Expand Expanding Close
Based on a whole succession of leaks, there’s a clear consensus view on two of the three colors we can expect when the iPhone 18 Pro is unveiled next week.
But two prominent leakers have different expectations when it comes to whether the third colour will be silver or black …
Expand Expanding Close
Bloomberg carries a piece noting the astonishing gains made by Apple stockholders during the time when Tim Cook was CEO. The cumulative gain was 2,275% – or a total return of 2,736% when accounting for dividend payments also.
The site suggests this will make him a tough act to follow, but my own view is that new CEO John Ternus doesn’t have to emulate Cook’s management of the company …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple yesterday presented what it said was “shocking evidence” based on analysis of a MacBook owned by Chang Liu, a former employee who moved to OpenAI. The company is alleging that two of its former employees stole trade secrets relating to hardware design and more.
The AI company hit back with its own legal filing, saying that the whole situation is “a mess of Apple’s own making” …
Expand Expanding Close
Both Apple pundits and most of the internet seem to agree that Vision Pro is the best way to watch baseball, following the immersive experience offered by Apple’s Friday Night Baseball.
Notably, there also seemed to be a consensus view that less is more when it comes to the various immersive camera angles …
Expand Expanding Close
The latest development in the trade war Trump started with Canada is an executive order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. Google Maps has updated the name, though what you see depends on which country you are in, with only US users seeing Lake America. Apple Maps has so far stuck to the real name …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple surprised many when it quietly announced updated Mac mini and Mac Studio models shortly before its September event. We would normally have expected these announcements to be part of that event.
One strong theory is that the company may be making a lot of big announcements in its ‘Surprise and shine‘ keynote, and therefore wanted to get these updates out of the way beforehand. But a new report presents another theory …
Expand Expanding Close
A report yesterday suggested that Apple considered making a special version of the Apple Pencil for the upcoming iPhone Ultra before deciding against it.
Bloomberg suggests that there are three reasons behind this decision, one of them being a desire not to conflict with the position adopted by Steve Jobs when launching the original iPhone. However, this was almost certainly not the deciding factor …
Expand Expanding Close
I recently observed that Apple appeared to have abandoned Cinematic mode, and a video experiment perfectly illustrates my frustration at this fact.
That’s not because the feature is bad, but rather that it comes so close to being good enough for real-life use that it’s hard to see why Apple hasn’t taken advantage of the massive increases in power between the iPhone 13 on which it launched and the latest iPhones. Let me show you what I mean …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple has announced what it describes as the sneakiest crossover of the summer in the form of Sneaky Sasquatch joining forces with Subway Surfers+ in Apple Arcade – together with a collection of stickers for the Messages app …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple has announced an expansion of its Supplier Employee Development Fund, a $50 million educational program for workers in its supply chain, in the form of a new Apple Education Center in Vietnam.
The country is becoming an increasingly important manufacturing center as Apple diversifies beyond China, and the center operates in partnership with Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) …
Expand Expanding Close
Meta has reached a settlement with US states in an $18B lawsuit accusing the social media giant of deliberately making Instagram addictive to teenagers. The money will be used to fund youth safety initiatives and more, though there is a catch.
More importantly, the company has agreed to introduce unprecedented protections against overuse of its social media apps by teens …
Expand Expanding Close
For a time, it was unclear whether the flip or fold form factor was the future of folding smartphones, but for now at least, it seems clear that the book-style fold is the winner.
It’s what we saw from Samsung’s 8th-generation folding phone, it’s what we’re expecting from the iPhone Ultra, and leaked images of Xiaomi’s 18 Fold also follow the trend …
Expand Expanding Close
When we ran a poll last month, the overwhelming majority of 9to5Mac readers agreed that Apple should exit the ad business.
Ads have now landed in Apple Maps in the US and Canada, and my view is that they are every bit as bad as expected …
Expand Expanding Close
Instagram now has a new iPhone-exclusive feature that can create reels automatically. You just select your video clips and it creates an edit with a single tap.
However, Meta is being extremely careful not to upset creators by implying that the app can replace their manual editing skills …
Expand Expanding Close
Sometimes a headline is the complete inverse of the real news in the story, and that’s the case with a new survey measuring interest in the upcoming iPhone Ultra. The headline says 75% of US adults aren’t interested in a folding iPhone, while the real surprise is that as many as 25% are.
Apple shouldn’t get too excited by the results, however, as willingness to pay was way, way less than the price we’re expecting the company to announce …
Expand Expanding Close
There was a pleasant surprise in yesterday’s announcement of the Mac Studio with M5 Max chip: the starting price is unchanged from that of the M4 Max Mac Studio, at $2,499.
However, if you want to upgrade the GPU, there is a gotcha in the cost of doing so – it will cost you $300 more than Apple’s website initially indicates …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple hit its 50th birthday this year, and many of its customers are even older. The company has created a new support page outlining 50 ways to make its devices easier to use, mostly using accessibility settings.
These range from changing the size of text on an Apple Watch to having your iPhone alert you when your washing machine cycle is complete …
Expand Expanding Close