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 Chinese government forced Apple to remove VPN apps from the App Store there way back in 2017, and the company is now having to do the same in India.
So far, a small number of VPN apps have been removed to comply with an anti-privacy law barring anonymous use, but many more are likely to follow …
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Telegram verification is already available for public figures and bodies, but it’s now rolling out a new system where accounts can be verified by third-party organizations …
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Phishing attacks are about to get a whole lot more convincing. A new report warns that scammers are now using AI to scrape information about you from your online profiles in order to send hyper-personalized emails which target your login credentials.
By finding out everything from your employer to your interests, scammers can send emails which have a far greater chance of appearing to be genuine …
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Many start the new year full of good intentions on the exercise front, and Apple is offering some encouragement through a homepage promotion of a free three-month trial of Apple Fitness+.
The offer itself isn’t new – it’s been available with the purchase of a new device since 2022 – but the homepage promo is clearly intended to tap into new year resolutions …
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A leaker with a mixed track record has claimed that this year’s iPhone SE will be getting an upgraded name to reflect its new design: the iPhone 16E.
We are expecting the budget model to get its biggest ever upgrade this year, finally dropping the large chin with Home button for a modern form factor based on the iPhone 14 …
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I’ve been arguing that passwords are horrible for the best part of a decade now, and was an enthusiastic early adopter of the far better approach of passkeys.
Passkeys were supposed to achieve the holy grail of an approach which is both more secure than passwords and so easy to use that everyone would adopt them. But a new piece outlines four problems with the technology …
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A US Army soldier has been arrested on suspicion of extorting money from AT&T and Verizon, following data breaches which saw a massive amount of customer data obtained.
The 20-year-old was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, on suspicion of being the cybercriminal known as Kiberphant0m – and statements by his mother aren’t likely to help …
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CarPlay 2, aka next-generation CarPlay, was announced way back in the summer of 2022. At the time, Apple said that a list of supporting cars would be available in 2023, and two brands were later said to be launching in 2024.
Today is the last chance to hit that deadline, and Apple’s CarPlay webpage still carries that promise. Unless there’s a surprise announcement later today, the question is: Will the date be quietly changed to 2025, or is this project now dead in the water … ?
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CNET’s headline reference to “a rare look inside Apple’s secret iPhone 16 camera labs” is somewhat hyperbolic, since there’s nothing secret about them: we’ve seen one of them a couple of times before.
But the piece does, all the same, provide an interesting look at some of the testing processes used during the development of a new iPhone …
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A recent software update resulted in a significant number of bricked Meta Quest headsets, with Meta initially shrugging and saying that for out-of-warranty Quest 2/3/3S models it wouldn’t be fixing the problem …
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A full half of the jobs created by the first TSMC Arizona chip plant have been filled by workers from Taiwan, despite the company receiving up to $11.6B worth of grants intended in large part to generate US jobs.
The original headline news of Apple chips being made in the US by American workers has seemed less and less impressive over time …
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A developer has noted that Apple’s Photos app shares your iPhone photos with Apple by default, for an iOS 18 feature known as Enhanced Visual Search.
This is an expansion of the older Visual Look Up feature, which can recognize objects within your photos, but a privacy note in the Settings app implies that it sends more data to Apple …
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Display analyst Ross Young said back in September that the entire iPhone 17 line-up would be getting ProMotion displays, a feature currently exclusive to the two Pro models. This is now backed by a new supply-chain report over the weekend.
The latest report is a little less specific, referring only to “a high refresh rate,” but it does imply that non-Pro models will get both ProMotion benefits for the first time …
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All American Airline flights are currently grounded on Christmas Eve due to an unspecified ‘technical issue.’ AA subsidiaries are also unable to fly, and the company says it can’t say when the problem will be fixed …
Update: It was later revealed the problem was a software outage preventing weight and balance calculations. Flights are now resuming …
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Apple has yet to complete its transition from LCD to OLED, but will at some point move beyond this to microLED screens. Key supplier Foxconn has announced that it expects to begin mass production of the advanced display tech late next year.
Foxconn made the announcement as it revealed a partnership with Porotech for microLED to be used in future AR headsets …
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Apple is again supporting World Aids Day on December 1st, and will be donating $5 for every qualifying purchase between November 29 and December 8.
Update: The company set a cap of $3M on its donation, and (RED) has tweeted that Apple hit this cap and donated the full sum …
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded to a series of massive Marriott and Starwood data breaches, ordering the companies to make no fewer than 13 changes to ensure it can’t happen again.
More than 344 million customers were impacted by three separate security breaches, which revealed personal data that included credit card details and passport information …
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Former Apple design chief Jony Ive had long seen the holy grail of iPhone design to be “a single slab of glass” without any bezels. A new supply-chain report says Apple had hoped that the iPhone 18 would see it achieve that objective, but it now looks unlikely.
The goal, says the report, is to have the entirety of the front of the device be display, with the screen flowing seamlessly into the sides of the phone …
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The iPhone and iPad could have different default search engines, argues a Google court filing, as the company attempts to protect its $20B a year deal with Apple.
Google’s annual payment to Apple to be the default search engine in Safari looks certain to be banned in an antitrust case, but the search giant is hitting back with a number of counterproposals …
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Ray-Ban Meta have been the most successful smart glasses to date, offering an appealing mix of features in a form factor which is visually indistinguishable from normal sunglasses.
So far, all of the AI functionality, notifications, and messaging features have relied on the glasses reading things to you through integrated speakers, but a new report says a future model will get a display, and that it could launch as early as next year …
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One of the key elements of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips is the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design which tightly integrates all the components within a single package. This includes both CPU and GPU.
But a new report suggests that the M5 Pro chip may take a different approach of having more separated CPU and GPU in order to improve performance and boost production yields …
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There have been consistent reports that we can expect a future iPhone to offer a variable aperture lens within a year or two, but there’s been disagreement about whether the new feature will launch in the iPhone 17 or iPhone 18.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously said the major camera upgrade was coming to the iPhone 18, while The Information pointed instead to the iPhone 17. Kuo has now doubled-down on his earlier prediction …
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A report over the weekend suggested an Apple smart home doorbell with support for Face ID is in development. It follows an earlier report of an Apple smart home camera next year.
While it could be argued that both are commodity products, and that Apple’s most important contribution is the HomeKit platform rather than the hardware, there seems little doubt about the opportunity here …
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Even a brief review of the App Store revealed more than 200 “risky or inappropriate” apps rated as ok for children, according to a new report. They had collectively notched up more than 550 million downloads.
Two child safety groups say that more than 25% of the child-rated apps they reviewed gave cause for concern, suggesting that the total number of problematic apps is very much higher …
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