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 US Army soldier has been arrested on suspicion of extorting money from AT&T and Verizon, following data breaches which saw a massive amount of customer data obtained.
The 20-year-old was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, on suspicion of being the cybercriminal known as Kiberphant0m – and statements by his mother aren’t likely to help …
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CarPlay 2, aka next-generation CarPlay, was announced way back in the summer of 2022. At the time, Apple said that a list of supporting cars would be available in 2023, and two brands were later said to be launching in 2024.
Today is the last chance to hit that deadline, and Apple’s CarPlay webpage still carries that promise. Unless there’s a surprise announcement later today, the question is: Will the date be quietly changed to 2025, or is this project now dead in the water … ?
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CNET’s headline reference to “a rare look inside Apple’s secret iPhone 16 camera labs” is somewhat hyperbolic, since there’s nothing secret about them: we’ve seen one of them a couple of times before.
But the piece does, all the same, provide an interesting look at some of the testing processes used during the development of a new iPhone …
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A recent software update resulted in a significant number of bricked Meta Quest headsets, with Meta initially shrugging and saying that for out-of-warranty Quest 2/3/3S models it wouldn’t be fixing the problem …
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A full half of the jobs created by the first TSMC Arizona chip plant have been filled by workers from Taiwan, despite the company receiving up to $11.6B worth of grants intended in large part to generate US jobs.
The original headline news of Apple chips being made in the US by American workers has seemed less and less impressive over time …
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A developer has noted that Apple’s Photos app shares your iPhone photos with Apple by default, for an iOS 18 feature known as Enhanced Visual Search.
This is an expansion of the older Visual Look Up feature, which can recognize objects within your photos, but a privacy note in the Settings app implies that it sends more data to Apple …
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Display analyst Ross Young said back in September that the entire iPhone 17 line-up would be getting ProMotion displays, a feature currently exclusive to the two Pro models. This is now backed by a new supply-chain report over the weekend.
The latest report is a little less specific, referring only to “a high refresh rate,” but it does imply that non-Pro models will get both ProMotion benefits for the first time …
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All American Airline flights are currently grounded on Christmas Eve due to an unspecified ‘technical issue.’ AA subsidiaries are also unable to fly, and the company says it can’t say when the problem will be fixed …
Update: It was later revealed the problem was a software outage preventing weight and balance calculations. Flights are now resuming …
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Apple has yet to complete its transition from LCD to OLED, but will at some point move beyond this to microLED screens. Key supplier Foxconn has announced that it expects to begin mass production of the advanced display tech late next year.
Foxconn made the announcement as it revealed a partnership with Porotech for microLED to be used in future AR headsets …
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Apple is again supporting World Aids Day on December 1st, and will be donating $5 for every qualifying purchase between November 29 and December 8.
Update: The company set a cap of $3M on its donation, and (RED) has tweeted that Apple hit this cap and donated the full sum …
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded to a series of massive Marriott and Starwood data breaches, ordering the companies to make no fewer than 13 changes to ensure it can’t happen again.
More than 344 million customers were impacted by three separate security breaches, which revealed personal data that included credit card details and passport information …
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Former Apple design chief Jony Ive had long seen the holy grail of iPhone design to be “a single slab of glass” without any bezels. A new supply-chain report says Apple had hoped that the iPhone 18 would see it achieve that objective, but it now looks unlikely.
The goal, says the report, is to have the entirety of the front of the device be display, with the screen flowing seamlessly into the sides of the phone …
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The iPhone and iPad could have different default search engines, argues a Google court filing, as the company attempts to protect its $20B a year deal with Apple.
Google’s annual payment to Apple to be the default search engine in Safari looks certain to be banned in an antitrust case, but the search giant is hitting back with a number of counterproposals …
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Ray-Ban Meta have been the most successful smart glasses to date, offering an appealing mix of features in a form factor which is visually indistinguishable from normal sunglasses.
So far, all of the AI functionality, notifications, and messaging features have relied on the glasses reading things to you through integrated speakers, but a new report says a future model will get a display, and that it could launch as early as next year …
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One of the key elements of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips is the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design which tightly integrates all the components within a single package. This includes both CPU and GPU.
But a new report suggests that the M5 Pro chip may take a different approach of having more separated CPU and GPU in order to improve performance and boost production yields …
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There have been consistent reports that we can expect a future iPhone to offer a variable aperture lens within a year or two, but there’s been disagreement about whether the new feature will launch in the iPhone 17 or iPhone 18.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously said the major camera upgrade was coming to the iPhone 18, while The Information pointed instead to the iPhone 17. Kuo has now doubled-down on his earlier prediction …
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A report over the weekend suggested an Apple smart home doorbell with support for Face ID is in development. It follows an earlier report of an Apple smart home camera next year.
While it could be argued that both are commodity products, and that Apple’s most important contribution is the HomeKit platform rather than the hardware, there seems little doubt about the opportunity here …
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Even a brief review of the App Store revealed more than 200 “risky or inappropriate” apps rated as ok for children, according to a new report. They had collectively notched up more than 550 million downloads.
Two child safety groups say that more than 25% of the child-rated apps they reviewed gave cause for concern, suggesting that the total number of problematic apps is very much higher …
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I didn’t waste any time when AirTags first came out, immediately buying eight of them: for five bags, keys, a videography rig, and a bicycle. But I’ve also repurposed some of them during trips for some AirTag sharingwith friends, and iOS 18.2 makes this option even better.
I’ve confessed before to being something of a bagaholic, so the first thing I did was to slip an AirTag into each of my main bags, where they live almost permanently …
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We learned earlier this week of a Bluesky extortion issue, emerging after the social network said that it would use domain name ownership as a way to verify the identity of public figures.
Bluesky hasn’t fully addressed the issue, but has taken one step toward reducing the problem of scammers impersonating well-known people on the platform …
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AI video editing based on text prompts is coming to Instagram next year, with the company’s head showing off the ability to do things like change your clothing and video background, as well as some funkier stuff like adding animated characters.
The company had earlier shown a demo video (below) of completely AI-generated video, stating that it was just a research project, but it seems the first practical application of the tech is arriving sooner than expected …
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Apple’s Vision Pro strategy of launching a very high-end professional product first, and a more affordable consumer version second, is likely to prove successful in the long-run, predicts market intelligence company TrendForce.
The company says that although many have criticized the very high price tag, the device has still captured a respectable 5% of the market, and has created expectations which competitor brands will need to meet …
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Analytics data suggests that we’re downloading fewer iPhone apps this year than last, but spending significantly more money on them. That’s because almost half of developer revenue now comes from subscriptions.
App Store downloads declined slightly in the past 12 months, but the total spend increased dramatically from $73.7B last year to $91.6B this year …
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An Apple Intelligence Chinese launch isn’t looking much closer, as the company continues forced talks with local companies about partnerships.
Apple reportedly wanted to use its own generative AI models in China, but that would require government approval which – it has been strongly implied – would not be forthcoming …
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