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.
The ability to sync passwords and bookmarks between devices is a core feature of most browsers, but not something DuckDuckGo supported until today.
Safari lets you do this using your Apple ID, and Chrome via your Google account – but that’s not an approach DuckDuckGo wanted to take. The privacy-first company said that it was focused on creating an entirely private way to do this, with no account needed …
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Mark Zuckerberg‘s Vision Pro video on Instagram got a lot of attention after he claimed that his own company’s Meta Quest 3 is “better period” than Apple’s spatial computer.
The Internet mostly saw it as a predictably self-serving take, and many on X are describing it as his Steve Ballmer moment …
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Apple has announced an innovative new artificial intelligence tool which could enable anyone to create animations. Apple Keyframer is an AI animation generator that needs nothing other than a still image and a text instruction.
It comes just a few days after the company revealed MGIE, a way of editing photos using text commands …
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Apple has bought the web domain iwork.ai, which some are taking as evidence of plans to introduce major new artificial intelligence features into the company’s productivity suite …
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Last year was a pretty brutal time for many Spotify employees, with thousands of jobs cut in three separate rounds of layoffs. But the loss of one particular engineer is threatening the future of the innovative music encyclopedia Every Noise at Once – and fans of the service are not happy …
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There’s good news for those who were fans of the Wunderlist to-do list app before Microsoft killed it. The founder of the app is back with a new incarnation of the spirit of Wunderlist, called Superlist.
One Wunderlist enthusiast has been trialling the beta version of Superlist, and says that while it’s not quite the same thing, it does reflect the sense of the original, and is even prettier …
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The iMessage antitrust threat hanging over Apple has now been removed, as the EU decides that the messaging service does not have enough European users to qualify as a dominant service.
That means that Apple will not be required to support messaging interoperability, which would have allowed messages to be sent between competing chat apps …
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The Amazon Prime Video free tier recently got a big downgrade, when it started showing ads for the first time, but it seems that’s not the only bad news.
German site 4KFilme first spotted that Dolby Vision and Atmos were no longer active on their smart TVs, and the company has now confirmed that this is a feature, not a bug …
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Peloton GymKit support is being withdrawn later this month, says the company. However, the company says that Apple Watch users won’t be left out in the cold …
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There’s been no shortage of Vision Pro stunts since the device was launched, like fake traffic stops. Celebrities have also been having fun with the facial spatial computer, including T-Pain, Diplo, and Casey Neistat.
But while this may all seem just some random silliness, one analyst suggests that this type of coverage is helping to normalise the device – something that never happened with Google Glass …
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A number of large US companies are using AI monitoring systems to analyse employee communications in popular business apps like Slack, Teams, and Zoom …
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Buying any first-gen Apple product has always been associated with a certain degree of bravery, whether that’s because of the inevitable bugs and shortcomings of any venture into a new product category, or because of the risk of buyer’s remorse when the second iteration is so much better.
Many consider Vision Pro could be the ultimate example of this, and a report over the weekend says that some members of the Apple team responsible for the product think that only the 4th-gen model will really deliver what they set out to achieve …
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Amazon has announced that the price of the cheapest Ring doorbell subscription is being increased again, amounting to a doubling in cost since 2022 …
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Vision Pro’s EyeSight feature is something Apple has stressed as a key product differentiator over rival headsets, and as a way of solving the isolation problem when using this kind of tech.
But comparing a range of real-life examples with Apple’s promo images leads one reviewer to conclude that it doesn’t really work …
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A Disney/Epic Games partnership announced this week may see the Fortnite developer return to the App Store despite the fractious relationship between Apple and Epic.
The collaboration will see new games featuring characters and stories across a range of Disney worlds, including Walt Disney, Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel …
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A test of using Lightroom on Vision Pro found that the controls were easy and intuitive, but it did require a somewhat slower pace than working on a Mac.
Also, being based on the iPad app, the Vision Pro version of Lightroom doesn’t support all the features of the Mac app – and has one rather odd omission …
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A new report says that Apple bought “up to” 32 AI startups in 2023, more artificial intelligence acquisitions than any other tech giant.
Apple is also said to have bought companies at an earlier stage in their development …
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Apple is one of more than 200 companies and other organisations to join the US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), at the request of the White House.
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidis are among the other companies to join the consortium in response to an executive order by President Biden to ensure that artificial intelligence is “safe, secure, and trustworthy” …
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit claiming that Apple CEO Tim Cook was overpaid by tens of millions of dollars.
A lawsuit brought by a pension fund invested in AAPL claimed miscalculations meant that the company paid far more than the compensation committee intended …
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Perhaps the primary question to be answered regarding Apple’s new spatial computer is: What is it for? And the bigger version of that question: Is Vision Pro a first step toward the future of computing?
Right now, in a world where relatively few people have even tried it, and even fewer of them have bought it, it’s clear that there’s nothing remotely approaching a consensus. Answers range from “Of course not, it’ll just be a short-lived gimmick” to “Absolutely, this will replace our Macs” …
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A security researcher with a track record of helping Apple identify vulnerabilities in its software seemingly found one particular security hole too tempting.
Instead of reporting it to the Cupertino company, he allegedly exploited it to scam the company out of gift cards and products worth some $2.5 million …
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Apple’s AI work may be something of a slow-burn when it comes to Siri, but the company isn’t sitting back doing nothing. The company has just released an open-source AI model for editing photos using simple text commands – something which has been described as a breakthrough achievement.
Named MGIE – for Multimodal large language model Guided Image Editing – the model allows the user to use natural language to tell the editor what it is you want to achieve …
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It looks like sports fans are set for an extremely comprehensive all-in-one option. Disney-owned ESPN is partnering with FOX and Warner Bros Discovery to create a package of no fewer than 14 different channels.
The joint venture will offer access to thousands of games and events, across a diverse range of sports – and you’ll be able to bundle the new service with Disney+, Hulu, or Max …
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A new report from China suggests that Vision Pro may launch in the country under a different name, thanks to Huawei successfully registering the name as a trademark back in 2019.
The same report suggests that the spatial computer will go on sale in the country in either April or May …
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