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.
Apple has revealed how the new Siri AI features will work for users in China. The new AI features will be powered by Alibaba’s Qwen models.
While the iPhone maker is partnering with Google for access to its Gemini models in most countries, the Chinese government requires Apple to instead partner with a local AI company …
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One of the most annoying elements of the iPhone user interface is the guessing game we have to play when changing settings for an app.
Some of the time we open the app itself and go to its built-in settings menu. Other times we have to exit the app and open the completely separate Apple Settings app, which is a clunky experience to say the least (though a free shortcut helps) …
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A Bloomberg report yesterday suggested that we could see a pretty dramatic shake-up in a future Apple Watch lineup.
In particular, it suggested that the company was exploring the possibility of one or more models with a round rather than square form factor …
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A new TrendForce analysis estimates that Apple will pay 38% more for iPhone 18 Pro components than it did for its predecessor. Unsurprisingly, the biggest hike is in the cost of memory, with Apple said to be paying around three times more this year.
However, the firm’s analysis supports my own view that this year’s increase in price will not be as high as some have suggested …
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When Apple unveiled the iPhone 13 back in 2021, it made a huge deal over a headline new feature, Cinematic mode. This is the video equivalent of Portrait mode, allowing you to select a focus point and blur the background.
Portrait mode has improved dramatically in successive generations, but the same cannot be said of Cinematic mode. The company appears to have completely lost interest in the feature, and although that’s understandable in one way, I would argue it’s a big mistake …
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The most blatant security backdoor yet seen in an internet router has been found in a range of models sold under multiple brand names. A firmware implant phones home to cloud servers in China to ask for instructions, and can then be remotely controlled …
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When Reddit significantly changed its user interface way back in 2018, there were widespread protests from those who preferred the original. The company has retained access to this at old.reddit.com, and last year promised this version would continue to exist for as long as people kept using it.
That promise may now be under some degree of threat as Reddit says that it “plans to make changes” to Old Reddit in order to protect against AI data scraping …
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Even Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged that Vision Pro is a niche product. I’ve argued in the past that it’s an essential step along the way to a more affordable and consumer-friendly Apple Glasses product.
But it’s also worth noting that sometimes niche products can make a huge difference within specialist fields, and a new surgical study provides a very clear example of why it matters to patients and surgeons alike …
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Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman stirred things up a little with what was likely a deliberately teasingly-phrased tweet. Some took this to be a reference to a live iPhone keynote presentation instead of a pre-recorded one.
That seems unlikely, but there are a couple of reasons for suspecting that the live elements may be livelier this year …
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I don’t use TikTok myself, but from all of the second-hand reports I see, it seems to have become a massive repository of terrible advice. This apparently now includes videos advising people to put their iPhones into the fridge when they become hot …
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While claims of a $1,399 starting price for the iPhone 18 Pro may be exaggerated, there’s no doubt at all that we are going to see steep price increases for this year’s lineup.
Apple has already prepared the ground for the resulting sticker shock with the new Apple Upgrade program, and now T-Mobile is responding with the launch of a new 3-year payment plan …
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One of the theories voiced about how a former Apple employee may have accessed confidential documents after leaving the company to join OpenAI has been dispelled by a court filing.
It has been suggested that access to the documents may have been inadvertent due to a seemingly messy iCloud arrangement for Apple employees – but the company says this is not the case …
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A T-Mobile outage last week left many iPhone users across the US without service for several hours, and Redditors are now reporting that they’ve been able to obtain compensation ranging from $10 to $80 …
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We learned yesterday that a judge is allowing a $32B lawsuit to proceed, alleging that Apple Photos face recognition violates a state privacy law.
It has been conflated with Meta’s use of face recognition, despite the two companies’ approaches falling at opposite ends of the privacy spectrum. In allowing the case to proceed, the court fundamentally misunderstands how the feature works …
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Apple reportedly exceeded $10 billion in annual sales in India for the first time in its last fiscal year.
The achievement is all the more remarkable in a country with an average annual salary of less than $3,000 – especially when factoring in that iPhones cost more in India than they do in the USA …
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Apple has waited a very long time to launch its first foldable iPhone, with Samsung already eight generations in to its Galaxy Z Fold series.
There were already good reasons for Apple to wait, but the latest Samsung experience seems to indicate that the iPhone maker’s timings couldn’t have been better …
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We know for sure that Apple will increase iPhone prices when the iPhone 18 Pro launches next month. The company exempted existing iPhones when it increased prices across the board to reflect higher memory prices, but that was only ever going to be a temporary reprieve.
However, two sources are now suggesting that the starting price of this year’s Pro models will be $1,399 – and I find it hard to believe even Apple would go that far …
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While it’s been reported that Apple is debating whether or not the camera in its upcoming glasses product should allow users to shoot photos and videos, DuckDuckGo is going one step further …
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What seems like a deliberately vague comment by outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook during the earnings call suggests that heavy Siri AI usage could be more expensive than we’ve so far expected.
While it had always seemed clear that we wouldn’t be able to make unlimited use of Siri AI without paying for it in some way, Cook’s remarks do appear to point to some bad news …
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Apple’s cautious entrance into the smart glasses field means that we have a reasonably good idea what to expect, and have been able to preview some of the capabilities through existing devices.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses have given me two years’ experience of the kind of capabilities we’re expecting from the first Apple Glasses model, and the Even Realities G2 are currently giving me a preview of what we can expect from a later model: smart glasses with a display …
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Apple will today announce its earnings for its fiscal Q3 ending in June, with the usual Q&A with analysts following immediately afterwards. It follows the company briefly hitting a $5 trillion market cap before slipping back slightly.
Today will be the final earnings call with Tim Cook as CEO, and analysts aren’t expecting any surprises – but there will be one very big question …
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Romance scams are one of the oldest cons in the online world, but they continue to pull in new victims all of the time. Joint research by four universities suggests that AI chatbots are now even better at carrying out these scams than humans, and that’s a pretty scary prospect …
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Jony Ive and Sam Altman have been teasing an AI hardware device for a long time now, and it’s increasingly looking like that tease was premature. We’re still not expecting to see a launch until some point next year.
OpenAI continues to be exceedingly vague about what form its first hardware device might take, but an interview yesterday seems to point to something rather like a HomePad …
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The ability to add a digital version of your driver’s license to your iPhone looks like it will be rolling out to a 15th US state before too long.
Apple currently lists 14 states where the capability is supported, alongside the territory of Puerto Rico, and backend assets now indicate another one will soon be added …
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