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.
If you’re looking to make money on Threads, it is possible, say creators, but there’s currently no clear roadmap on how to do so. Even those making thousands of dollars a month say they don’t know how it works …
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A patent granted today describes an Apple projector capable of displaying a mix of AR and VR content onto the desk and walls of your home or office without the need for a headset or screen.
The company says that a mix of low-res and hi-res content could be projected, and that the device might be motorized so that it can turn to display content on different surfaces …
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Following yesterday’s launch of the iPad mini 7, Apple has also made a couple of changes to the cheapest iPad in the line-up in a number of European countries.
The box no longer contains a charger, only a USB-C cable, and that has been offset by a price cut …
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The official NBA app – described as the official home of basketball – has been upgraded to support multiview, in time for the 2024-2025 season.
There are a whole bunch of other new app features, and it’ll surprise nobody to learn that these are AI-powered …
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Yesterday saw the announcement of the new iPad mini 7, and the biggest news here is that, three years after the launch of its predecessor, it’s not much of an upgrade.
It feels like Apple did pretty much the minimum necessary here, which includes using the oldest possible processor capable of running Apple Intelligence …
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Mark Gurman didn’t sound overly excited when he reported his expectation that a lower-priced Apple Vision product would launch as early as next year, but it might well be the model to have me press the button.
Gurman said that Apple is expecting sales of the $2,000-ish model to double those of the Vision Pro, “but that’s not saying much” …
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iPhone filmmaker Joey Helms, noted for his cinematic city footage of each year’s iPhone Pro models, says that the iPhone 16 Pro is not a big upgrade from last year’s model.
He also answered questions about how he mounted the iPhone on a drone for the aerial shots in this year’s video …
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This year’s entire iPhone 16 line-up got 8GB RAM to run Apple Intelligence features, and it looks like we can expect 12GB in future models.
A previous report suggested that iPhone 17 Pro Max would get 12GB, and it now appears that this may be true for both iPhone 18 Pro models …
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Accidentally released TikTok documents reveal that the company knows the app is addictive to children, and damaging to their mental and social development.
The documents also show developer ByteDance knew that screen-time tools it introduced would be ineffective, and were nothing more than a PR measure …
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An iPhone 16 Pro Max vs Samsung Galaxy S24 camera comparison concludes that it’s hard to pick an overall winner given the role played by personal preferences, but the range of sample shots provides a really good chance to judge for yourself.
The piece starts out by noting that Samsung wins the megapixel war, though we’ve frequently cautioned that squeezing ever more pixels into a tiny sensor can actually result in worse images …
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China has detained four Taiwanese employees at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, the largest iPhone production facility in the world, responsible for around 80% of global production.
The employees were detained using powers the Chinese government last year granted to itself. No specific reason has yet been given, but it seems likely the move is political …
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In what is now an annual tradition, filmmaker Joey Helms has created a stunning iPhone 16 Pro cinematic video demo reel, in his home city of Chicago.
This year he paired up with Sam Perez to mount the new phone on a drone to include airborne shots – and, of course, included some extra-slo-mo footage to highlight the new 120fps 4K capture capabilities …
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I’m a big fan of the Wallet app as a single place to store all my tickets and passes for everything from travel to theater, but not every company directly supports the app.
Passbook is one of a number of apps which allow you to take any existing ticket and import it into the Wallet app, to keep everything together …
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An upcoming premium Ring doorbell subscription will offer 24/7 recording, and AI-powered search, from $19.99 per month.
The Amazon-owned company is also renaming two of its existing subscription tiers, while Ring Protect Pro subscribers will have to choose between upgrading or downgrading …
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Meta’s Threads app may be seeking to further push into the territory occupied by the app formerly known as Twitter, taking on one of Elon Musk’s favorite features.
The feature is known as Loop, and one developer who spotted the reference said that it might be similar to the Communities feature on X, or subreddits …
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The legal status of the free music streaming app Musi has long been unclear – but the matter may now be settled, thanks to a lawsuit the developer has filed against Apple.
Musi sourced its music from YouTube using a method it claims was perfectly legal, while parent company Google disagreed. When the two sides were unable to reach agreement, Apple pulled Musi from its App Store – a move the developer says lacked good cause …
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A new market intelligence report indicates that global Mac shipments fell by 17.5% year-on-year in the previous quarter. That’s against a backdrop of roughly flat sales across all laptops and desktops.
Technically Q3 saw the global PC market achieve a fourth consecutive quarter of growth, as total shipments were up year-on-year, though just barely …
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Followed apparent photos of an M4 MacBook Pro box and a subsequent unboxing video, the unreleased model has now been offered for sale on a Russian classified ads site – at a highly inflated price, naturally.
Multiple units were advertised before the listings were removed, and it does now seem increasingly likely that the leaks are real …
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One of the new features of iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia is iPhone Mirroring – but using this with a personal iPhone on a work Mac currently creates a privacy risk for employees, and a legal risk for businesses.
The problem, as cybersecurity company Sevco discovered, is that apps on the iPhone get treated as Mac apps, and that means their presence is included in corporate IT audits …
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Apple has announced that its next annual Swift Student Challenge will open for submissions in February 2025. You can sign up today to be notified when applications open.
As usual, Apple will select 350 winners, and the top 50 of them will be invited to participate in WWDC in Cupertino in the summer …
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Macworld enjoys its more provocative pieces, the latest of which takes issue not just with the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16, but with the Action button before it.
Those particular views aside, it goes on to argue that a fixed(ish) annual iPhone update cycle forces Apple to launch new phones before it really has enough to offer …
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It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US.
What’s notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement …
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A MoneyGram hack has seen an attacker obtain the personal data of an unknown number of the company’s 50 million money transfer users.
A separate hack of a debt collection company has seen personal data obtained for more than 200,000 Comcast customers, despite previous assurances that this was not the case …
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It’s no secret that the Apple Intelligence rollout is a gradual one. The first six features are expected to launch at the end of this month, and we’re not anticipating the new version of Siri to properly debut until some point next year.
But one analyst thinks we should temper our expectations further, and that iPhones aren’t going to offer “serious” AI performance until 2026 or 2027 …
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