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 rejected the idea of making touchscreen Macs for well over a decade now, but a recent remark by a senior company exec did appear to at least open the door to the possibility of a change of heart.
Mac and iPad marketing VP Tom Boger recently responded to a question on the topic by initially appearing to stick to the usual line – but added “I can’t say we never change our mind” …
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A new supply-chain report says that the iPhone 16 battery will have greater energy density than that of current iPhones. This could potentially give the device a longer battery-life, though Apple may instead opt to use a smaller battery.
Additionally, the report says that Apple plans to swap out the aluminum battery housing for stainless steel, which has both pros and cons …
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Elon Musk may have rebranded Twitter to X last summer, but one of the more notable contradictions was that URLs remained as twitter.com. That has finally changed today.
X users accessing via the web today have seen twitter.com URLs redirect to x.com. Musk announced the migration on Twi– er, X …
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An EU investigation has been opened into growing concerns about teen Instagram addiction, to determine whether parent company Meta is breaking the law by deliberately seeking to make its apps addictive.
The investigation will also look into whether the company’s age-verification procedures are sufficiently robust, and the phenomenon of sending users down potentially harmful ‘rabbit holes’ …
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Intel has proudly announced Thunderbolt Share, a way to connect two Windows PCs together to allow one to control the other, as well as sharing files and screen-sharing. The company says it doesn’t yet work on a Mac – despite the fact that it borrowed the feature from Macs in the first place …
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The iOS 18 accessibility features yesterday previewed by Apple have been hailed as “life-changing” by a disability campaigner.
Accessibility advocate Colin Hughes praised Apple for responding to a key request he made via 9to5Mac back in March …
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An upcoming AT&T satellite service promises to bring satellite comms to the iPhone 12 and 13 for the first time. Unlike Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite service, it will support phone calls as well as text messages.
As such, it will offer more functionality to more people than the Apple satellite comms feature, but there are a number of unanswered questions …
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We’re expecting the Vision Pro international rollout to happen not long after WWDC, and we’ve now seen another element of the plan fall into place.
An “Apple wearable computer” has been granted the Chinese quality and safety accreditation it needs to be released for sale in the country …
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A new Apple press release highlights Apple Watch golfing apps, as Golfshot launches a new tool to analyse your golf swing on the range.
The latest feature has been made possible by the high-frequency motion API Apple added in watchOS 10 …
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A number of commenters have made the point that iPad reviews haven’t really changed in years. Each generation, the hardware gets better, and the software gets left behind. That has led some to suggest a dual-boot iPad, which can switch between iPadOS and macOS as desired.
However, former Microsoft exec Steven Sinofsky – who was President of the Windows division for several years – says this idea “is just nuts” …
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There’s good news if you didn’t place a pre-order but have now decided to buy one of the latest iPads. Both the new iPad Air and iPad Pro are available for immediate store pickup today in each of the locations we checked.
Reasonably prompt delivery is also available, ranging from same-day in some locations to 2-5 days in others …
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Apple is continuing its PR offensive to promote the official App Store as the safest place to buy iPhone apps, after antitrust cases forced it to open up its platform to competition. It said that it has blocked more than $7B’s worth of attempted App Store fraud.
The company says that the “potentially fraudulent transactions” were detected and blocked over a four-year period from 2020 to 2023 …
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When I tried Ray-Ban Meta glasses last week, I described the AI features as largely a gimmick at this point, but still making me feel excited for a future Apple Glasses product.
Several commenters noted that the glasses do somewhat better when given follow-up questions, and I tried out this feature on another walk, to reveal a mix of hits and misses. But what’s really missing at present is integration …
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MacPaw’s Setapp Mobile launches as an invitation-only beta in the EU today, offering European iPhone owners a far easier way to get access to multiple apps for a single monthly subscription than the clunky US experience.
Even better, for the lucky ones given access to the early beta, it’s free for now …
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The White House has announced steep increases in a number of Chinese import tariffs, raising the prospect of another trade war between the two countries.
The last time this happened, China directly threatened to use Apple as a bargaining chip in response to new tariffs imposed by the previous administration …
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The OLED screen is the headline feature of the shiny new iPad Pro, but it seems that a little more software tweaking may be needed. Testing by one reviewer found that the device struggles to display certain shades of blue.
Specifically, HDR highlights are blown out, appearing almost white, in a problem the report says is replicable on the 13-inch iPad Pro …
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If you haven’t yet watched yesterday’s OpenAI event, I highly recommend doing so. The headline news was that the latest GPT-4o model works seamlessly with any combination of text, audio, and video.
That includes the ability to ‘show’ the GPT-4o app a screen recording you are taking of another app – and it’s this capability the company showed off with a pretty incredible iPad AI tutor demo …
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After Apple was required to make big changes in Europe to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Microsoft and Booking.com have also been ruled to be subject to the antitrust law …
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The US judge who ordered Apple to allow developers to sell apps outside of the official App Store has sharply criticized the way the iPhone maker has responded.
Epic Games went back to court to claim that Apple was not properly complying with the antitrust order, and remarks made by judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers indicate that she is in agreement …
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We learned earlier this month that Apple was actively discussing a success-based bonus system for Apple TV+ talent – in which writers, actors, and directors would be paid less up-front, but receive greater rewards when shows proved popular with audiences.
A new report reveals some of the specifics of this, including the three criteria Apple would apply to determine who receives the bonus payments of up to $10.5M per season …
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Update: Meta is beginning its promised AI rollout to more countries, with the glasses getting AI capabilities in Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Paraguay, Philippines and the UK. More countries will follow in the coming weeks.
I feel like current glasses tech is giving us partial peeks into an Apple Glasses future. Viture One XR glasses provide one potential take, and the Ray-Ban Meta glasses another – and perhaps suggesting the future may be closer than I thought …
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While an expensive, bulky Vision Pro headset undoubtedly has its place for some, Apple’s longer-term goal is believed to be a product dubbed Apple Glasses: bringing AR capabilities into something with a similar form-factor and weight to conventional eyeglasses or sunglasses.
Squeezing that much tech into a much smaller device is, of course, a huge challenge – but researchers at Stanford’s Computational Imaging Lab may have come up with at least part of the solution …
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We learned late last year that a Microsoft iOS app store was in the works, and the company has now announced that this will launch in July.
Initially, it will be limited to Microsoft’s own games, but will later open up to other iPhone game developers, giving them an alternative outlet to Apple’s official App Store …
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There’s been much debate on whether playing video games has a positive or negative impact on kids – and now teen gamers themselves have weighed-in.
A new large-scale survey of US teens found that around 40% of them played every day – with smartphones almost as popular a gaming device as consoles – and reported a mixed impact on their life …
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