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.
With WWDC fast approaching, Apple has highlighted some of the resources and support options available to developers.
These include the YouTube channel first announced back in March, and the Pathways resource launched last month …
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iPhone voice transcription is already included in iMessage, and is available in some other chat apps – but not always for free. In Telegram, for example, you have to pay for a premium membership to get the feature.
The latest Bloomberg piece says that Apple is finally bringing audio transcription to the Voice Memo app, and this seems a perfect opportunity to make it a system-wide feature …
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A change to Adobe terms set the internet alight yesterday, after a number of pro users of the company’s apps reacted with anger and confusion to the scary-looking wording.
The company initially issued a rather dismissive statement that its terms have been in place for years and it was merely clarifying them, but subsequently wrote a blog post which tackled the issue in more detail …
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A new report suggests Apple may announce a number of iOS 18 Mail app AI features during WWDC.
These include the option to automatically create Smart Replies to emails, as well as the ability to draft a reply yourself and then ask Siri to change the tone – for example, ‘make this sound more professional’ …
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Update: Both the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office and the European Commission have now launched investigations into the legality of making it opt-out instead of opt-in.
If you use Instagram or Facebook, Meta is using your data to train its AI models. The company uses posts as training material for its generative AI systems. Privacy legislation in the UK and European Union means that the company is forced to offer an opt-out option – but it is doing so in a rather sketchy way …
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It’s not unusual in pieces around Apple’s move to OLED for iPads (now) and MacBooks (in future) to have someone ask in the comments why the company doesn’t just skip ahead to micro-LED. The latest Samsung’s micro-LED TVs point to two very good reasons …
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eBay is dropping Amex card support, emailing users to advise that it will no longer accept American Express cards for payments from mid-August …
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Update: Adobe has now clarified the meaning and intent.
A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop has outraged many professional users, concerned that the company is claiming the right to access their content, use it freely, and even sub-licence it to others.
The company is requiring users to agree to the new terms in order to continue using their Adobe apps, locking them out until they do so …
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Nvidia has overtaken AAPL in the market cap stakes, as its valuation exceeded $3T. The company’s rise in value has been truly spectacular, increasing from $2T back in February to more than $3T just four months later.
The company is now challenging Microsoft for the title of most valuable company in the world, and for the same reason …
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Apple continues to dominate the wearables market, says a new report, despite a steep drop in shipments for both Apple Watch and AirPods.
There was movement lower down the charts, with Huawei taking third place from Samsung during the first quarter of the year …
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If you use the Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitoring system, you’ve long been able to view your blood sugar measurement on your Apple Watch – but you can now do so without your iPhone.
Previously, the G7 wirelessly transmitted the health data to your iPhone, which then relayed it to your Apple Watch …
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Apple’s OpenAI partnership – which will be used to bring generative AI features to Siri – is likely just an interim one, while the company expands and deepens its own chatbot tech.
The prediction was made by Dag Kittlaus, who co-founded Siri before the tech was acquired by Apple …
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A TikTok hack allowed attackers to take control of CNN’s account, while other high-profile accounts were also targeted.
The nature of the security breach remains a mystery at present. It was said to have involved direct messaging, but was seemingly not a phishing attack …
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TSMC’s Apple chip plants cannot be moved off the island, the company has said, despite ever-growing fears of a Chinese invasion.
The chipmaker’s chairman C.C. Wei said that it had held talks with “some customers” about the idea following China carrying out war-game exercises around the island, but that it simply isn’t practical …
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An Aptoide iOS game store launches in Europe on Thursday, the third, uh, third-party app store to be announced after Setapp and AltStore.
All three companies are taking advantage of the changes Apple was forced to make in the EU by the Digital Markets Act, which opens up the App Store to competition for the first time …
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The latest version of Apple’s iPhone recycling robot no longer unscrews devices in order to access the innards; instead, it rips them apart.
The change is one of many that have seen the practicality of Apple’s recycling robots grow from something which took 12 minutes per phone – which the company admits was really just a research project – to 18 seconds …
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Update: After reports that cloud storage provider Snowflake may have been compromised, the company said there is no evidence of this. Reading between the lines, the attack may have been made via Snowflake, but it appears to have been TicketMaster credentials that were compromised.
A TicketMaster hack has been confirmed by the company in an SEC security filing, stating that personal data of its users has been offered for sale on the dark web. The agency has not confirmed the scale of what appears to have been a massive breach …
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ChatGPT is down for many, with OpenAI acknowledging on its status page that the chatbot is “unavailable for some users.”
The partial outage appears to be global, though recovery does now appear to be in progress, with DownDetector showing a decline in the number of reports …
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A report last month suggested that we might see the first foldable iPhone in 2026, but market intelligence company TrendForce has described this as “unlikely.”
The company, which monitors and forecasts demand for components, says that 2027 is the earliest date Apple is likely to launch a folding iPhone …
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The judge in the Apple versus Epic Games case has told the Cupertino company that she wants to see all of the company’s documents relating to its revised App Store policies – and she has strongly emphasised that she means all of them.
It follows earlier remarks in which she strongly implied that Apple was guilty of bad-faith compliance with the antitrust ruling she made back in 2021 …
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An engineer with extensive experience of working with Bluetooth found himself bamboozled when told that he needed to enable a wireless connection to use a cheap pair of wired Lightning headphones – and that turned out to be correct …
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It’s now 15 years since the last of Apple’s award-winning “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads, but rival companies still believe it’s clever to use the Mac actor to try to sell rival products.
After Huawei and Intel, Qualcomm is the latest company to make the attempt, with an incredibly cringeworthy ad in which the Mac guy – played by Justin Long – decides it’s time to get a PC …
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We’re a little over a week away from the WWDC keynote, in which Apple is expected to announce a slew of new AI features as part of iOS 18.
This is expected to be the point at which Siri gets generative AI smarts, thanks to a deal with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT tech …
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The TikTok algorithm could be split, claims a report, with a US-only version used for the hugely popular app to try to avoid a ban.
Developer Bytedance has tweeted that the report is not accurate, but its message appears to be more a repetition of its legal stance than a specific denial …
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