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Ben Lovejoy

benlovejoy

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.

Connect with Ben Lovejoy

This looks set to be the most expensive Apple collectible ever sold

The contract that founded Apple will be auctioned for an estimated $3M | Close up of the signatures

The contract that founded the Apple Computer Company (now Apple, Inc) is set to be auctioned and is expected to sell for between $2 million and $4 million. It will likely be the most expensive Apple collectible ever sold.

Auction house Christie’s hasn’t yet added the document to its website, but it is reportedly offering the contract in an auction taking place on January 23 …

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This ChatGPT voice update previews what we can expect from the new Siri

A new ChatGPT voice update has made interacting with the chatbot far more flexible than it used to be, and I think is an example of one of the key things we can eventually expect from the new Siri.

While OpenAI’s change might seem like a relatively small one on the surface, I’m already finding that it completely transforms the experience of using ChatGPT

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Coding assistance websites exposed credentials for banks, government, and more

Coding assistance websites exposed credentials for banks, government agencies, and more | Website code shown on a MacBook screen

Two websites intended to help software developers format and structure their code have exposed thousands of login credentials, authentication keys, and other highly sensitive information.

Cybersecurity researchers found that this sensitive data belonged to organizations in many high-risk sectors like government, banking, and healthcare …

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Apple falsely accused of misleading users about App Tracking Transparency privacy

Apple falsely accused of misleading users about App Tracking Transparency privacy (permission dialog shown)

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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I’d love to see Apple adopt a tick-tock approach to software releases

I'd love to see Apple adopt a tick-tock approach to software releases | Photo shows a young snow leopard

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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Retail chain accidentally sold iPad Airs for $17 – and wants them back

Retail chain accidentally sold iPad Airs (shown) for $17 – and wants them back

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 steal customer data from JPMorgan Chase and Citi

Hackers steal customer data from JPMorgan Chase and Citi | Stock photo of a modern skyscraper

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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New Apple video highlights vapor chamber liquid cooling in iPhone 17 Pro

New Apple video highlights vapor chamber liquid cooling in iPhone 17 Pro | Screengrab water droplet with the strap line: Vapor cooled for serious performance

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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A cluster of Mac Studios is just one reason we no longer need a Mac Pro

A cluster of Mac Studios is just one reason we no longer need a Mac Pro | Mac Studio on a desktop (sorry about the xmas trees, it was a colorful image ...)

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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Cloudflare explains the mistake that took down large chunks of the internet yesterday

Cloudflare explains the mistake that took down large chunks of the internet yesterday | Close-up photo of an purely illustrative error message

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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WhatsApp security flaw exposed 3.5B phone numbers – including yours [U]

WhatsApp security flaw exposed 3.5B phone numbers – including yours | Close up of a crowd of people all using their smartphones

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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