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.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported over the weekend that some Apple employees believe that the company is about two years behind the curve on artificial intelligence.
Tim Cook didn’t directly address that during an interview with the WSJ, but did say that the company’s aim is always to be best, not first – and that this includes AI …
Expand Expanding Close
Meta is testing facial recognition as a way of letting you instantly recover your Instagram or Facebook account if you find yourself locked out. The process of submitting a video selfie looks much the same as that used to register for Face ID, requiring you to turn your head in different directions.
The company is also using the technology to detect and block scams using celebrities …
Expand Expanding Close
The iPhone 16 line-up offers an impressive boost to battery life, but there are still occasions when our iPhone needs some help to make it through a long day.
If you can’t rely on being in one place long enough to top-up by cable, a portable battery pack can save the day. I tested out two very different battery-powered wireless chargers …
Expand Expanding Close
Update on October 21: The hackers still have access to support tickets and the email addresses of the users who submitted them, and are currently sending replies.
An Internet Archive data breach has been confirmed by the organisation, which has also been suffering Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The home of the Wayback Machine was previously attacked back in May …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been the main independent board director for sneaker company Nike for the past 19 years, but the brand is currently facing its biggest challenge during that time …
Expand Expanding Close
While the iPhone 16 launch was all about Apple Intelligence, many have accused the company of being very late to the AI party. Indeed, a new piece yesterday suggested that this view is shared by many inside the company.
But Apple CEO Tim Cook argues in a new interview that he doesn’t see it that way, and says that the company has taken its time with AI for the same reason it has with every innovation …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple is supporting a national parks initiative in China, geared to providing training and education within the field of nature conservation.
The work in five of China’s national parks is being done through the China Green Carbon Sink Foundation, and the company likely has both public and private objectives …
Expand Expanding Close
A new survey reveals that almost half of Americans have forgotten to cancel a trial subscription. It also corroborates earlier findings that we’re now spending around $1,000 a year on subscription services.
The survey comes as the FCC announced new rules ensuring that companies can’t use deceptive practices to hook us into taking out subscriptions, nor make it hard to cancel them …
Expand Expanding Close
Whenever an Apple device generates a strong password for you, the structure of those secure passwords isn’t entirely random.
Instead, Apple created rules specifically designed to make them easier to type if you ever have to do that manually, and to make them briefly memorable …
Expand Expanding Close
The FCC has announced new requirements for all smartphones to be compatible with all Bluetooth hearing aids, and one quirky impact is that this will include AirPods Pro 2.
It will also require iPhones to support all Bluetooth hearing aids, not just MFi ones …
Expand Expanding Close
The latest Apple Store opened today in Belfast, Northern Ireland – with local schoolchildren getting access to it ahead of the opening.
The location of the store is carefully described as being “on the island of Ireland” rather than “in Ireland” …
Expand Expanding Close
Including personal details in AI chats is never a good idea, given that many of them are in part trained on the content of those conversations, but there’s now another reason not to do this …
Expand Expanding Close
Apple last year launched its Roadside Assistance via satellite feature in the US, intended to provide help to those stranded by car trouble in areas without mobile coverage. That service has now been quietly extended to the UK.
You’ll need an iPhone 14 or later to use the service, and you’ll need to know ahead of time how to use the feature to summon help …
Expand Expanding Close
Instagram is introducing new measures to protect teens from sextortion, by making it harder for criminals to blackmail them.
Separately, it appears to be working on a new Social Library feature intended to make it easier to find posts you’ve shared, liked, or been sent in chat …
Expand Expanding Close
A regulatory filing reveals that the iPad mini 7 charging speed is limited to 20W, the same as its predecessor.
This means that the device will take around an hour to charge to 70%, and about two hours to go from empty to fully-charged – significantly slower than the speeds offered by some Android tablets …
Expand Expanding Close
We’re expecting Apple to launch the M4 MacBook Pro by the end of the month, and supply-chain reports appear to corroborate this.
Revenue and shipment reports from three Mac suppliers suggest that production is well underway, as Apple stockpiles machines ready for launch …
Expand Expanding Close
If you’re looking to make money on Threads, it is possible, say creators, but there’s currently no clear roadmap on how to do so. Even those making thousands of dollars a month say they don’t know how it works …
Expand Expanding Close
A patent granted today describes an Apple projector capable of displaying a mix of AR and VR content onto the desk and walls of your home or office without the need for a headset or screen.
The company says that a mix of low-res and hi-res content could be projected, and that the device might be motorized so that it can turn to display content on different surfaces …
Expand Expanding Close
Following yesterday’s launch of the iPad mini 7, Apple has also made a couple of changes to the cheapest iPad in the line-up in a number of European countries.
The box no longer contains a charger, only a USB-C cable, and that has been offset by a price cut …
Expand Expanding Close
The official NBA app – described as the official home of basketball – has been upgraded to support multiview, in time for the 2024-2025 season.
There are a whole bunch of other new app features, and it’ll surprise nobody to learn that these are AI-powered …
Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday saw the announcement of the new iPad mini 7, and the biggest news here is that, three years after the launch of its predecessor, it’s not much of an upgrade.
It feels like Apple did pretty much the minimum necessary here, which includes using the oldest possible processor capable of running Apple Intelligence …
Expand Expanding Close
Mark Gurman didn’t sound overly excited when he reported his expectation that a lower-priced Apple Vision product would launch as early as next year, but it might well be the model to have me press the button.
Gurman said that Apple is expecting sales of the $2,000-ish model to double those of the Vision Pro, “but that’s not saying much” …
Expand Expanding Close
iPhone filmmaker Joey Helms, noted for his cinematic city footage of each year’s iPhone Pro models, says that the iPhone 16 Pro is not a big upgrade from last year’s model.
He also answered questions about how he mounted the iPhone on a drone for the aerial shots in this year’s video …
Expand Expanding Close