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.
IKEA has been combining speakers with lamps for some time now, and its latest lineup includes new versions of these as well as round speakers with eye-catching graphics.
The company says its latest models with graphics created by local designer Teklan will add form, color, and character to a room …
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Both mobile and desktop versions of the Pocket Casts app have introduced a new playlist feature designed to help you organize your favorite podcasts.
You can manually create your own playlists by hand, while a Smart Playlists option can apply your own rules to do the job automatically …
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The iPhone Fold has entered the next stage of production after what is said to be a “breakthrough” in eliminating the crease normally seen in folding phones when they are laid flat.
Although the display is being made by Samsung, several elements are said to have been designed by Apple and will be unique to the device …
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A competition regulator has accused Apple of misleading users about the level of privacy offered by the App Tracking Transparency feature. That accusation, while made in good faith, is based on a misunderstanding.
The iPhone maker has responded by saying that it may be forced to withdraw the privacy protection from EU users …
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A Bloomberg report suggests that next year could be a Snow Leopard-style update for each of Apple’s operating systems. In other words, the company will prioritize working on bug fixes and reliability over new features.
The timing of this claim seems dubious to me: as Gurman himself acknowledges, Apple absolutely has to introduce a lot of AI improvements next year, so I don’t see how it can possibly qualify as a bug-fix year. Timing aside, however, this is something I would love to see …
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A large retail chain offered 13-inch iPad Air models to loyalty card holders for $17, with both online orders and in-store collection sales processed and the iPads handed over to their new owners.
It took the company 11 days to realize it had made a mistake, and it is now asking customers who bought the iPads to either return them or pay almost full price for them. Unfortunately for the retailer, the terms and conditions attached to the order did not exclude pricing errors …
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Hackers have obtained customer data from a third-party company used by major Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citi. The disclosure comes just days after a Doordash data breach exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, and more.
SitmusAMC helps banks process mortgage applications and other real estate loans, and says that accounting records and legal agreements have been impacted by the hack …
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One of the new features of the iPhone 17 Pro is a liquid cooling system known as a vapor chamber. Apple has today highlighted the benefits of this in a new video on its YouTube channel, called Peak Performance.
The minute-long video opens with a man running in a desert and a drop of water falling from the sky to land on his forehead with a sizzle …
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The latest update to the Matter smart home standard has launched today: Matter 1.5. The headline news is that smart cameras get support for the very first time.
This effectively brings Apple Home compatibility to a much wider range of cameras, and this is not the only new product category included in today’s launch …
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Given Apple’s profitability, it won’t come as any surprise to learn that the company generates a huge amount of revenue per employee.
The figure itself is a little more eye-opening, at $2,413,171 – but it’s still not enough to give Apple first place in the tech giant rankings …
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Like its predecessor, the M5 Vision Pro is currently only available in a limited number of countries. Apple just added two more to the roster as it opened pre-orders in Korea and Taiwan.
Potential customers in both countries can also book Apple Store appointments from today for a personalized trial of the spatial computer …
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A Doordash data breach has exposed the personal data of an unspecified number of customers, including name, phone number, email address, and physical address.
The food delivery company says that it has implemented a number of security measures in response, including reporting the attack to law enforcement …
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The EU’s landmark privacy law, GDPR, was one of the best things to happen to the internet for a very long time. But it also came with one of the most annoying things on the web: a never-ending series of pop-ups asking us to make cookie choices …
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Back in the Intel days, the Mac Pro was the computer many of us lusted over even if we had no possible justification for actually buying one. It was by far the most powerful Mac and the easiest to upgrade – not to mention one of the most beautiful machines the company ever made.
The 2023 Mac Pro was even more gorgeous than its predecessor, but with the radical new architecture of Apple Silicon, the writing was already on the wall …
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With a growing number of legislators wanting to set limits on the use of social media apps by teenagers and children, TikTok is hitting back.
The company argues – with an apparently straight face – that new features like an affirmation journal, background sound generator, and app badges are likely to be more effective …
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Huge chunks of the internet were completely unavailable yesterday, with many other websites and services experiencing slow performance. It was immediately clear that the problem was with the Cloudflare network, but it took some time for the company to establish the true cause.
Cloudflare says that it initially believed it was experiencing a massive cyber-attack, but subsequently realized the problems were caused by a “painful” error with a software update …
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Update, 7:11 p.m. ET: A Meta representative reached out to 9to5Mac and provided the following statement:
“We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information. We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.”
A massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed the phone number of almost every user on the planet – despite the fact that parent company Meta had been alerted to the vulnerability way back in 2017.
Security researchers were able to use what they described as a “simple” exploit to extract a total of 3.5 billion phone numbers from the messaging service …
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Apple has today announced the most popular podcasts of 2025 through a comprehensive set of charts, which include the most popular episodes and most shared shows.
The iPhone maker’s editorial team has also put together its own curated selection of what it considers to be the best shows of the year …
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A new market intelligence report suggests that the iPhone 17 lineup is selling incredibly well in China, despite this being a somewhat tricky market for Apple.
It reveals that one in every four smartphones sold in China during October was an iPhone, and that total sales beat the previous record set back in 2021 …
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It’s not just the Twitter brand name that is no more – direct messages are also being replaced by X Chat. The new private messaging feature finally brings end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the platform – though with one question-mark …
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Way back in 2009, Apple added a very handy feature to iMacs, allowing them to be used as a monitor for another Mac – typically a MacBook. Known as Target Display Mode, the company unfortunately dropped the feature from the model launched in late 2014 and it has never returned.
If you want to do the same with later iMacs, there is an app for that, as we outlined last year. But Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs opted instead for the ultimate conversion …
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There’s been a whole flurry of rumors about a 2nd-gen iPhone Air lately. It’s getting a second camera; it’s been delayed to allow time to add this; it’s been indefinitely delayed due to the original model proving unpopular; it probably won’t be getting a second camera but will be getting an updated chip.
Whenever there are this many conflicting reports, the smart money is on nobody outside Apple really knowing what’s going on. But if the second camera report is true, that leaves another question to be answered …
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There’s long been speculation about when Apple CEO Tim Cook might retire and who is likely to replace him. That intensified earlier this month when he turned 65.
Cook himself has made only two on-the-record statements, but a new report over the weekend suggests that the company is now ramping up preparations to replace him “as soon as next year” …
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The iPhone’s Portrait mode uses computational photography to simulate the shallow depth of field of a digital SLR or mirrorless camera with a larger sensor. It’s evolved from a very crude tool into something which is now pretty convincing, but it’s still no substitute for the real thing.
There are some circumstances in which you can get genuine shallow-ish depth of field with an iPhone shot, but these are very limited as we’ll discuss. The Sandmarc 2x telephoto lens is a much more practical way to get true optical blurring when shooting portraits …
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