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 T-Mobile class action lawsuit has been filed by customers on plans with a lifetime price guarantee. The carrier broke that apparent promise by cancelling legacy plans, and switching them to a more expensive one.
The lawsuit relates to a number of plans sold with the promise that “T-Mobile will never change the price you pay” …
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An Adobe exec is quoted as describing its hidden pricing strategy as being “a bit like heroin.” The remark was revealed when the government released its unredacted complaint, which accuses the company of deliberately making it hard to cancel a Creative Cloud subscription.
The exec acknowledged customer anger at the way the company made its contractual terms hard to understand, but said that improving this would result in “taking a big business hit” …
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We’ve noted the contradictory and hard-to-parse rumors about a new iPhone 17 Slim, with some suggesting it will be the top-end model while more recent reports indicate that it may be less powerful than the Pro models.
The more I read about this device, the more it sounds like Apple may be aiming to get yet another step closer to that vision of “a single slab of glass” – and making another attempt at a strategy it first tried with the 12-inch MacBook …
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Max SharePlay is now rolling out to all ad-free subscribers worldwide, allowing anyone with a compatible Apple device to host a watch party via iMessage or FaceTime …
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One of the features Apple announced for iOS 18 at WWDC was Emergency SOS Live Video – a way to share live or recorded video with 911 operators so they can get a better sense of what’s happening on the scene.
Two of the companies that provide connectivity to 911 services say they will be supporting the feature from this fall …
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Reddit is now blocking all search engines except Google from indexing its site as it effectively implements a paywall for AI training.
Back in February, it was revealed that Google was paying Reddit more than $60M a year to get access to user posts to help train its AI models …
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A new Apple research lab is about to open in China, focusing on boosting the quality and reliability of iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision products.
The company chose the city of Shenzhen because many of its suppliers are based there, and it will be working closely with them to test new materials and production techniques …
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EU countries are currently set to miss out on Apple Intelligence features, but that may now change as a result of a new agreement between the US, EU, and UK on AI regulation.
Four law enforcement bodies have agreed to adopt “common principles” in the way that they address antitrust concerns over AI products and services – though some of the wording could potentially prove problematic for Apple …
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Meta Quest VR headsets are to get AI features ahead of Vision Pro, with Meta updates rolling out next month.
The move will see the artificial intelligence features currently available in Ray-Ban smart glasses brought to the Quest too, initially as an experimental feature …
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A new report suggests that the iPhone 18 will be getting at least one new sensor, and that it will be made by Samsung rather than Sony.
If correct, it would represent an end to Sony’s exclusivity on the contract for iPhone sensors …
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The Information yesterday carried a report focusing on Apple’s work on a foldable iPhone, but it also included a reference to an iPhone 17 feature which could be a big deal for photographers.
The piece suggested that at least one model will, for the first time, include a variable aperture, allowing better control over depth of field …
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iPhone imports into India are to get cheaper, thanks to a reduction in import taxes announced by the government. The change is expected to save Apple around $35M to $50M a year.
While India has become Apple’s second-biggest manufacturing hub after China, the company still imports a significant number of iPhones into the country …
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An Amazon Prime Video update rolling out today will address one of the biggest complaints made about the service – that it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t included with your subscription without first clicking on it.
Amazon also claims that the new user interface is simpler and more personalized, making it faster to find something interesting to watch …
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The House Homeland Security Committee has written to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, asking him to testify before Congress. The letter says the committee wants Kurtz to explain how the global IT outage happened, and what steps it is taking to prevent any repetition.
The demand comes as companies around the world struggle to recover from the global IT outage, with Delta saying that it has cancelled 4,000 flights since Friday and expects disruption to continue for another couple of days …
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Apple’s u-turn on PC emulators has made a bunch of things possible, and even easy – like running Windows XP on an iPad.
One tech writer who tried it says that it runs very slowly (though possibly no slower than it did on PCs of that era), but he’s never used his iPad more frequently …
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The Apple CSAM controversy doesn’t appear to be going away, as a British children’s charity accused the company of under-reporting incidents on its platforms.
However, the report appears to be based at least in part on a failure to understand how end-to-end encryption works …
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My diary pieces have so far been limited to Apple products, but I’m writing an Oura Ring diary because I view it as a good test of whether I think a long-rumored Apple Ring would be a good idea.
In other words, to answer the question we raised when the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Ring brought the form factor back into the headlines …
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Meta has filed a patent for a method of replicating Vision Pro’s EyeSight feature in its own virtual reality headsets.
It’s not surprising that Meta is keeping a close eye on Vision Pro, and looking to see what lessons it can learn for its own Quest headsets; it’s somewhat more surprising that it would seek to copy a feature which has been poorly received, and that Apple is likely to drop …
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The CrowdStrike aftermath is seeing IT teams around the world struggle to restore the 8.5 million Windows PCs taken out by the bug. The mess included thousands of flights cancelled, health centers unable to make appointments, retailer payment terminals down, and even some 911 services unavailable.
Macs weren’t affected thanks to protections put in place by Apple, but Microsoft has reportedly claimed that antitrust law means it’s unable to take the same approach …
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The sheer scale of the global IT outage caused by a faulty software update has left many wondering how one update to one company’s security software could have such massive impact.
Ironically, the effect of the CrowdStrike flaw has been almost identical to the very thing it’s intended to prevent …
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A report on J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for the VP ticket, is the latest pointer to a continuing privacy fail in which Venmo connections and transactions are public by default …
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A huge mistake by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has caused a global IT outage on a massive scale, with airlines, banks, health services, and more affected – including some 911 centers.
United, Delta, and American Airlines are among the airlines who have been forced to ground flights. Broadcaster Sky News was taken off-air for several hours. Many retailers have been unable to accept payments. In short, it’s chaos out there …
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Former Apple design chief Jony Ive has introduced previously unreleased video of Steve Jobs predicting the future when speaking at the International Design Conference in 1983, the year before the Macintosh was unveiled.
The 55-minute talk shows Steve predicting that sales of personal computers will one day exceed those of cars, something Ive says sounded “absurd” at the time …
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Apple said last month that it would be withholding its upcoming AI features from EU countries, and now Meta has followed suit, and for exactly the same reason.
The iPhone maker cited “regulatory uncertainties” in the bloc, and Meta has given the same explanation for its own decision to hold back future AI models …
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