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 class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 12,000 current and former staff claims that Apple underpaid female employees over a four-year period.
The lawsuit said that while the Cupertino company didn’t do this deliberately, it had two policies in place which led to this result …
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A research paper explicitly says that Apple doesn’t use your data to train Apple Intelligence. This differs from OpenAI’s policy, which does use your ChatGPT sessions to help train its model.
However, Apple says that it does scrape websites for content via Applebot, and website owners must explicitly opt-out if they don’t want this to happen …
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Yesterday brought a surprise report that Apple isn’t paying OpenAI for the ChatGPT deal, which will bring the chatbot to Apple devices later in the year.
It’s an impressive piece of negotiating by Apple, which would have been expected to have to pay a significant fee for all the server access provided, and an interesting gamble by OpenAI …
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Including audiobooks in the premium tier is nothing more than a Spotify scam, say music publishers, intended to cheat consumers and music labels alike.
They say the sole purpose of adding audiobooks into the subscription was to find an excuse for charging consumers more while paying music labels less …
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A South Korean regulator has said that Apple collected user location data without consent, and fined the company 210 million won (around $153k) for a privacy violation.
Apple was one of 188 companies found to have violated the Act on the Protection and Use of Location Information …
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Apple’s spatial computer is about to go on sale in eight more countries, and Vision Pro pre-orders will open tomorrow for three of them, and on June 28 for the rest.
Sales are being slightly staggered, with China, Japan, and Singapore first in line – and Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK following close behind …
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Every WWDC sees a number of apps Sherlocked by Apple – the colloquial term for Apple announcing new built-in features which replicate those previously available in third-party apps.
It’s always a tough break for indie developers to see the market for their apps disappear with a wave of Tim Cook’s hand, and this year is no exception …
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Demand for Apple Intelligence features will power an iPhone supercycle, according to an analyst – with Apple one of three companies in the race to become a $4T company.
Apple Intelligence will require an iPhone 15 Pro or better, meaning that the majority of current iPhone owners would need to upgrade if they want access to it …
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I recently had to Google how to get color text in the Apple Notes app, because the way to do this in iOS 17 is rather deeply hidden!
Especially if you want to do it in the iPhone or iPad app, you have to use one of three workarounds, because – strangely – the feature isn’t directly supported …
Update: Color text highlighting is now supported in iOS 18 beta 1, with some limitations. See the end of the piece for details.
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Perhaps upset that nobody cares about his own pet chatbot, Grok, Elon Musk launched a baseless attack on Apple’s AI announcements – saying that the iPhone maker wasn’t smart enough to create its own AI, and that ChatGPT isn’t safe.
OpenAI’s chief technology officer has now hit back at the latter part of the claim …
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iPhone mirroring in macOS Sequoia will be one of the cooler features when it lands, but sadly there isn’t any way to mirror your iPhone on Vision Pro.
“Aha,” you may be thinking, “I can think of a simple workaround for that!” But sadly the obvious cheat here doesn’t work …
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Apple Intelligence privacy is a key differentiator for the company’s own AI initiative, with the company taking a three-step approach to safeguard personal data.
But Apple says we won’t have to take the company’s word for it: It is taking an “extraordinary step” to enable third-party security researchers to fully and independently verify the privacy protections in place …
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We already knew it was going to be a wait for Apple Intelligence beta access, with the company warning that the new features won’t be available until later in the year, but code found in iOS 18 indicates that there will be a waitlist for access.
Apple has also indicated that, while Apple Intelligence will be available to those outside the US, we may have to put up with delayed responses …
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CEO Tim Cook has admitted in an interview that Apple Intelligence may hallucinate, but says that its responses will be “very high quality.”
He also said that the company has not been willing to compromise on its values to move into AI, and that there are guardrails in place for its upcoming artificial intelligence features …
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Apple briefly showed us a glimpse of an upcoming Blackmagic camera designed specifically for shooting Vision Pro immersive video during yesterday’s keynote.
The company has now shared a few images of the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive, which appears to be based on the URSA Cine 12K …
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The bad news from yesterday’s keynote is that Apple has never listed so many new features as “coming later.” This includes all of the Apple Intelligence ones.
The other bad news is that AI features will initially be limited to US English, although Apple’s wording here does suggest that those of us in other countries will still be able to try it …
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Aka I installed the iOS 18 beta 1 so you don’t have to …
I normally steer clear of the first developer beta of a new iOS release. This year I thought I wouldn’t be able to resist, as I was keen to play with the new AI features, but of course yesterday’s keynote quickly killed all hope of that. Every single one of them was billed as coming later. Still, there were a few things I did want to try, so I took a deep breath and pressed the button …
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Apple today formally introduced macOS 15, alongside iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 – and this year it’s really simple.
It’s also good news for those of us who dived in early with an Apple Silicon Mac …
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iPadOS 18 hasn’t given us all the features we’d like to have the software finally catch up with the hardware, but it’s still a very welcome update.
The bad news, of course, is that each major update means dropping support for some older iPads, and this year is no exception …
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Replacing the iPhone might seem a strange goal for Apple; it’s been the most successful product the company has ever made, and one of the most successful premium products any company has ever made. But it’s been reported that this is the company’s long-term goal.
Specifically, Apple execs were said to believe back in 2019 that an Apple Glasses product would replace the iPhone in roughly a decade …
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Microsoft Recall sounded like a very cool idea, but was very quickly revealed to be a security disaster. Instead of helping you recall everything you’ve done on your Windows PC, it was found that it could easily help a hacker do the same.
However, as much as the company messed-up the implementation, I do think there’s mileage in the concept, and if there’s one company I’d trust to do it with proper privacy protections, it’s Apple …
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A Frontier hack exposed the personal data of at least 750,000 customers, including full names and social security numbers, which places them at significant risk of identity theft. The ransomware group said to be behind the attack claims that the actual number is two million.
The company has now notified the customers it believes to have been impacted by the security breach, but waited almost two months to do so …
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Hidden Bar is a free Bartender alternative which might find itself seeing quite an uptake in demand, following the surprise takeover of the popular Mac utility.
While Bartender’s creator did later chip in with some comforting words, Bartender has a fairly frightening list of permissions – including the ability to take screengrabs of our Macs – so it’s not surprising that a number of us have opted to err on the side of caution …
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One of the things we’re expecting to be announced next week is a ‘new’ Apple Passwords app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac – a move we’ve suggested on more than one occasion.
For 9to5Mac readers, this will bring one small but worthwhile benefit. The really big impact, though, will be with non-techies …
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