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 new market intelligence report suggests that US Mac shipments were flat in the previous quarter, with Apple’s market share slightly declining.
Mac was up just half a percent year-on-year, against an overall average of 3.7%, but it’s likely that many are waiting for the M4 Macs we expect to see announced next month …
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Apple last month reached agreement with employees at the first Apple Store to unionize, and has now done the same, with a store in Oklahoma City.
The three-year contract covers much of the same ground as the contract in Maryland, though with higher pay rises agreed …
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Since the weather isn’t cooperative enough to do any outdoor shooting, I decided to start by putting the iPhone 16 Pro Max macro photography capabilities to the test, comparing to its predecessor.
In principle, macro shots taken with this year’s phone should be much more detailed, given the new 48MP sensor. However, the differences between the two aren’t vast, and I suspect have more to do with processing than sensor resolution …
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Update: Halide’s Sebastiaan de Wish says the company received a call from Apple informing them that this was a mistake. Halide can now resubmit to the App Store “without any changes required.”
Halide may have been featured during the iPhone 16 keynote, but it seems that wasn’t enough to protect it from an over-zealous App Store reviewer. Lux co-founder Ben Sandofsky shared that the latest version of Halide was rejected from App Store …
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With Apple CEO Tim Cook visiting New York for the iPhone 16 launch, comedian and The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon took a walk with him in Central Park.
Cook said that he tried to visit the Fifth Avenue store every iPhone launch “because it’s sort of the center of the world, and the enthusiasm is so incredible there” …
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macOS Sequoia screen recording permission reminders can now be permanently vanquished, thanks to a new pay-what-you-like app.
Apple’s new security feature was intended to make Macs safer, by reminding us that we’d granted a powerful and potentially dangerous permission to an app, but many experienced users simply found it irritating …
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More schools are banning students from using smartphones in classes, with calls for a federal ban rather than the current mix of state laws. Apple’s home state of California is expected to be the next state to introduce a ban.
Update: California has now signed The Phone-Free Schools Act into law. School districts have until July 1, 2026, to “adopt a policy to limit or prohibit the use by its pupils of smartphones while the pupils are at a school site” …
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The iPhone setup process has improved dramatically over the years. This year, as last year, I put my new iPhone next to my old one, and a good chunk of the setup was automated.
However, there are still more manual steps than I would like, and one particular pain point is that some of the gaps in the setup process don’t make themselves known until the first time you need to actually carry out particular tasks …
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Former Apple design head Jony Ive has confirmed reports that he was working on an AI hardware product in partnership with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. We still have no idea what it will do, or what form it will take (image is just a conceptual one of a mystery device).
Ive also shared that he bought a chunk of real estate in one of San Francisco’s most famous blocks, and plans include a LoveFrom store selling everything from notebooks to clothing …
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It’s a common claim that each year’s new iPhones are much the same as the previous models, and there’s of course some degree of truth to this.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman went as far as arguing in his latest newsletter that Apple’s pace of development with iPhones is such that we only see something truly new every five years …
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The iPhone 16 Pro Max DXOMARK test results are out, based on a rigorous analysis of 3,000 photos and 150 hours of video.
Apple’s latest flagship model was ranked #4 in the overall smartphone camera line-up, though the organization said that it delivers better video than any other mobile device it has ever tested …
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I’ve long used Shokz bone-conduction wireless headphones as my go-to for voice and video calls, mostly because they are so comfortable I often forget I’m wearing them.
I’ve been using the OpenComm model for a couple of years now, but switched to the new OpenRun Pro 2 for a couple of reasons – one of which was fixing my only real complaint …
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Immersed Visor is a new headset aiming to fill the middle ground between simple ‘face monitors’ like the $440 Viture One XR and the self-contained $3,500 Vision Pro. Weighing about the same as an iPhone 16 Pro, it’s priced at $1,050, though there are some sketchier price models.
Like lower cost monitor-in-glasses-format products, you can’t use it as a standalone device – it’s solely intended for use as a Mac monitor – but it does offer hand-tracking and eye-tracking …
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The iPhone 16 is arriving in Apple stores today, and we’ve already seen people sharing photos from Apple Stores in Australia, Malaysia, Japan, and Germany.
Apple has now started sharing official photos from Apple stores, kicking off this year’s collection with photos from China and South Korea …
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An Apple TV+ Oprah Winfrey biodoc won’t be shown after all, despite the fact that Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald completed filming.
A new report says that Winfrey refunded the sum Apple paid her for the project in order to prevent it from being aired …
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A popular YouTube channel has described the claimed 48 megapixel resolution of the iPhone 16 Pro’s camera as “absolutely fake.” Professional photographer Tony Northrup says that the true resolution is “around six megapixels.”
Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of Lux – the developer behind Halide and Kino – takes issue with this, and says the reality is more nuanced …
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One piece of good news from the keynote is that the shiny new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 will also be made available to developers of third-party camera apps.
Apple has published its guidelines for developers, which give us some idea of what we can expect when supported by our favorite photo and video apps …
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I’m one of many eagerly awaiting delivery of my iPhone 16 tomorrow (Pro Max, in my case), and the Camera Control button is the first thing I’m going to try.
If you’re in the same position, then an Apple support document provides an opportunity to familiarize yourself with it before your device arrives …
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We may still be waiting for iPhone 16 deliveries tomorrow, but the rumor mill is already busy looking ahead to both the iPhone 17 and iPhone 18.
A tweet by supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims to shed light on Apple’s plans for the adoption of smaller process chips …
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A survey by a UK bank suggests that AI-generated voice cloning scams are on the rise, with 28% claiming to have been targeted. It’s recommended that people agree a secret code to guard against the possibility of being take in …
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The first iPhone 16 reviews are out, alongside those of the Pro models, and the general verdict is that the gap between the two is smaller than ever.
While 9to5Mac readers have understandably favored the Pro and Pro Max, even the base model gets a lot of the new camera functionality, and reviewers were impressed …
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Apple A16 chips are now being made in TSMC’s US chipmaking plant in Arizona, according to a new report. It’s said that while yield rates are lower than those achieved in Taiwan, they are very close to hitting the same standards.
The big mystery, however, is why Apple would want to make new A16 chips. Which new product might use them … ?
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Discord end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is rolling out today for both audio and video calls. You can update to the latest mobile and desktop apps to get access to the privacy protection today.
There are, however, some exceptions to strong encryption, which result from a mix of technical limitations and Discord policy …
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It’s not often that upgrading to the latest model of an Apple product means sacrificing a key feature, but that is the case for anyone in the USA upgrading to the Apple Watch Series 10 from the S6 or later.
The reason is that, if you bought a Series 6, 7, 8, or 9 (before January 18), then it includes a blood oxygen measurement feature; if you buy the Series 10 or Ultra 2, you’ll lose that …
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