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 Grubhub security breach has exposed personal data for both customers and drivers, says the company, after an “incident” involving a third-party contractor.
The company has not revealed the exact scale of the security fail, but has admitted that the personal data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and partial credit card numbers …
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Spotify achieved its first full year of profitability since launching in 2008. The company has previously had occasional profitable quarters, but consistently lost money each year.
Apple may have played a role in the company’s turnaround, thanks to a change introduced last year …
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A Meta policy document describes the company’s fears that it could accidentally develop an AI model which would lead to “catastrophic outcomes.” It describes its plans to prevent the release of such models, but admits that it may not be able to do so.
Among the capabilities the company most fears are an AI system that could break through the security of even the best-protected corporate or government computer network without human assistance …
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An upcoming book Apple in China promises to tell the story of how a seemingly smart idea back in 1996 now leaves the company hostage to the whims of an authoritarian regime.
Subtitled “the capture of the world’s greatest company,” the book features interviews with more than 200 former Apple execs and engineers, and says it acts as both a historical account and a cautionary tale …
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New Orleans music students attending the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music (EMCM) are required to learn coding as part of their curriculum, as part of a collaboration with Apple.
Another mandatory course at the music school – no matter which primary instrument students have chosen to learn – is piano …
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Apple is benefiting from a new tax break in India, which will make it cheaper to assemble iPhones in the country. The change was announced by the government on Saturday.
We first learned about the plans last month, which are expected to be worth at least $2.7B in benefits to companies like Apple and Samsung …
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A zero-click WhatsApp spyware attack was made against 90 journalists and other “civil society members,” said Meta, which managed to detect the incident.
A zero-click attack means that victims don’t need to tap on a link or take any action in order for their devices to be compromised – simply receiving the message is enough …
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If you’re using the Microsoft Defender VPN on Mac or iPhone as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription, there’s bad news. The company has revealed in a support document that the privacy feature will cease to work at the end of this month …
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If you own an iPhone 11 or later, it includes some tech which does very little right now but is set to quickly become an extremely useful feature: Ultra Wideband (UWB).
Smart door locks incorporating UWB tech are now starting to hit the market, and these will offer the most convenient and secure unlocking experiences of all …
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Tests by security researchers revealed that DeepSeek failed literally every single safeguard requirement for a generative AI system, being fooled by even the most basic of jailbreak techniques.
This means that it can trivially be tricked into answering queries that should be blocked, from bomb recipes to guidance on hacking government databases …
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Over the weekend, Apple announced that it is making Swift Build open source. This is the build engine used by both Xcode and for the company’s internal projects.
Apple has also made a tiny name change to Swift Playgrounds, the app that helps people learn to code in Swift on iPad and Mac …
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TikTok has bounced back from its time offline according to traffic logs, but creators are worried about the uncertain future of the app.
Some are assuming the worst, and preparing for the platform to shut down, while others feel TikTok has a unique role and it would be difficult to replicate their success on other platforms …
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently isn’t very happy about employees leaking things he says during internal company-wide meetings. The company issued a memo threatening to fire people for leaking internal comms – and that memo was of course immediately leaked …
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Way back in 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple, alleging a defect in early Apple Watch models that could cause the display to crack or detach from the casing.
While Apple has acknowledged some issues related to swollen batteries, and offered free service, it refused coverage for cracked or detached screens. The company has now agreed to a financial settlement for this …
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You don’t have to be in the Super Bowl stadium to be exposed to a lot of noise during the game. A new Apple Watch study found that noise levels across America are significantly higher than normal for about nine hours on Super Bowl Sundays.
On average, across the US, you’re likely to be exposed to noise levels between 1.5 and 3 decibels higher than usual – which is a lot worse than it sounds when it comes to potential hearing damage …
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In a major security failing, Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek exposed chat history and other sensitive data in a database accessible without any authentication.
The security researchers who discovered the issue say that the exposure included more than a million lines of log entries, which included chat history and secret keys …
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Satellite video calls will be coming to Europe from later this year, following a successful demo of the tech by Vodafone in partnership with AST SpaceMobile. Rollout in the US through AT&T will follow some time later.
As with existing satellite text and voice calls, the service will operate in remote areas where no cellular coverage is available …
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For the 18th year running, Apple has been named Fortune’s Most Admired Company. The rankings are based of a survey of more than 3,000 company execs across 30 countries.
While Apple’s number one position was unchanged, a new company made the top five for the first time this year …
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DeepSeek privacy concerns have led to investigations being opened in both the US and Europe, and seen the app removed from the App Store in Italy. It seems likely the same will happen in other countries.
Italian’s privacy regulator questioned whether the app complied with GDPR, a tough privacy law that applies across 30 different countries …
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When Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of his many controversial decisions was to rebrand the company and social network platform as X. He said at the time that the purchase was “as an accelerant for X, the everything app” – aka a western clone of China’s WeChat.
Part of this vision includes becoming a mobile payment platform to compete with Apple Pay, and the company’s CEO today said part of this functionality will launch later this year …
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Along with threatening to impose a tariff on all goods from Canada and Mexico, Trump said this week that he also plans to impose duties of up to 100% on silicon chips imported into the US.
Some are suggesting that this would affect the price of everything Apple makes, as its chips are made in Taiwan, but that’s almost certainly not the case …
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A federal judge last summer ruled that the $20B+ Google pays to Apple to be the default search engine on the Cupertino company’s devices was illegal.
Several Apple execs testified in the case, but a request to present an additional three witnesses has been refused by the judge, saying Apple left it too late …
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Security researchers have discovered two flaws present in all current iPhones, iPads, and Macs – as well as many earlier ones. The vulnerabilities, known as SLAP and FLOP, could potentially allow an attacker to see the current contents of your open web tabs.
The flaws were introduced in the A15 and M2 chips, and are also found in subsequent ones, up to and including the latest version of each device …
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I’m a self-confessed neat freak in both physical and virtual worlds, so I like to keep my Mac app windows organised. I previously did so using Stay, but when the developer seemingly abandoned it I switched to Moom.
The app lets me instantly restore all my app windows to my preferred sizes and positions, whether I’m using my MacBook Pro in standalone mode or hooked up to my external monitor …
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