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.
A second judge in the Apple versus Epic Games lawsuit has implied that the Cupertino company has lied to the court. It comes after the original judge strongly implied that Apple had not told the truth about the reasons for its new App Store policy.
A second judge tasked with overseeing Apple’s disclosure of decision-making documents in the antitrust case said that a court filing made by the company was “simply not believable” …
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After Click to Cancel legislation for subscriptions, California has introduced another piece of consumer protection legislation for buying digital content.
It will force companies to tell you when you won’t actually own the content you think you’re buying – something which has occasionally been true for iTunes purchases …
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9to5Mac recently discovered evidence in iOS 18 that Apple is testing using future AirPods models to measure heartbeat, with our sources indicating that the feature will be implemented in both AirPods Pro 3 and the next generation of Powerbeats Pro.
An Apple patent application describes how the company can use a health sensor not just to measure heart-rate, but also to detect heart disease …
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Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.
Some of those passwords had been unprotected since 2012, and were searchable by more than 20,000 Meta employees …
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The iFixit iPhone 16 Pro teardown video is now up (below), and the company has highlighted some differences over last year’s model. This follows its earlier teardown of the standard and Plus models.
Top of the list, and exclusive to the iPhone 16 Pro, is a new type of battery. Apple has also had to make a compromise in order to create room for the Camera Control button …
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The Meta Quest Pro headset has been discontinued, with the company officially bidding goodbye to its most expensive headset while selling off remaining units. This follows an earlier decision to abandon work on an even more expensive Vision Pro competitor.
Meta had already slashed the price of the Pro from $1,499 to $999 within months of launch, but has now completely given up on the four-figure market …
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Former Apple design chief Jony Ive this week confirmed he’s working Sam Altman on an AI hardware product of some kind, despite the failure of existing products like the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1.
Humane last month admitted that returns were exceeding sales, and now Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu has confessed that the R1 averages just 5,000 daily active users …
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My colleague Filipe Espósito yesterday said that the prototype Meta Orion glasses are what he wants for the future of Apple Vision, and I agree that they are an incredible step in the right direction.
I’ve long said that an Apple Glasses product is what I really want to see, but as impressed as I am by what Meta has shown us, I still think it will be a few years before any of us will be wearing a pair of Apple Glasses …
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A new bill in California, dubbed “Click to Cancel,” has been signed into law. It requires companies to make it as quick and easy to cancel subscriptions as it was to subscribe in the first place.
Thanks to FTC interest, with Adobe being specifically called out on this, the provision may also become federal law …
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A group of parents are trying to get the agreement of an entire town to have their kids go without smartphones until they are 14 years old.
The hope is that if enough parents sign up to the initiative, it will remove the danger of isolating children from friends who do have phones …
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Display samples requested by Apple suggest that a future non-Pro Apple Vision headset is likely to have around half the resolution of the existing model.
Apple has reportedly requested samples of potential displays from both JDI and Samsung, with the Japanese company said to have recently provided this …
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A new market intelligence report suggests that US Mac shipments were flat in the previous quarter, with Apple’s market share slightly declining.
Mac was up just half a percent year-on-year, against an overall average of 3.7%, but it’s likely that many are waiting for the M4 Macs we expect to see announced next month …
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Apple last month reached agreement with employees at the first Apple Store to unionize, and has now done the same, with a store in Oklahoma City.
The three-year contract covers much of the same ground as the contract in Maryland, though with higher pay rises agreed …
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Since the weather isn’t cooperative enough to do any outdoor shooting, I decided to start by putting the iPhone 16 Pro Max macro photography capabilities to the test, comparing to its predecessor.
In principle, macro shots taken with this year’s phone should be much more detailed, given the new 48MP sensor. However, the differences between the two aren’t vast, and I suspect have more to do with processing than sensor resolution …
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Update: Halide’s Sebastiaan de Wish says the company received a call from Apple informing them that this was a mistake. Halide can now resubmit to the App Store “without any changes required.”
Halide may have been featured during the iPhone 16 keynote, but it seems that wasn’t enough to protect it from an over-zealous App Store reviewer. Lux co-founder Ben Sandofsky shared that the latest version of Halide was rejected from App Store …
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With Apple CEO Tim Cook visiting New York for the iPhone 16 launch, comedian and The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon took a walk with him in Central Park.
Cook said that he tried to visit the Fifth Avenue store every iPhone launch “because it’s sort of the center of the world, and the enthusiasm is so incredible there” …
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macOS Sequoia screen recording permission reminders can now be permanently vanquished, thanks to a new pay-what-you-like app.
Apple’s new security feature was intended to make Macs safer, by reminding us that we’d granted a powerful and potentially dangerous permission to an app, but many experienced users simply found it irritating …
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More schools are banning students from using smartphones in classes, with calls for a federal ban rather than the current mix of state laws. Apple’s home state of California is expected to be the next state to introduce a ban.
Update: California has now signed The Phone-Free Schools Act into law. School districts have until July 1, 2026, to “adopt a policy to limit or prohibit the use by its pupils of smartphones while the pupils are at a school site” …
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The iPhone setup process has improved dramatically over the years. This year, as last year, I put my new iPhone next to my old one, and a good chunk of the setup was automated.
However, there are still more manual steps than I would like, and one particular pain point is that some of the gaps in the setup process don’t make themselves known until the first time you need to actually carry out particular tasks …
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Former Apple design head Jony Ive has confirmed reports that he was working on an AI hardware product in partnership with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. We still have no idea what it will do, or what form it will take (image is just a conceptual one of a mystery device).
Ive also shared that he bought a chunk of real estate in one of San Francisco’s most famous blocks, and plans include a LoveFrom store selling everything from notebooks to clothing …
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It’s a common claim that each year’s new iPhones are much the same as the previous models, and there’s of course some degree of truth to this.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman went as far as arguing in his latest newsletter that Apple’s pace of development with iPhones is such that we only see something truly new every five years …
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The iPhone 16 Pro Max DXOMARK test results are out, based on a rigorous analysis of 3,000 photos and 150 hours of video.
Apple’s latest flagship model was ranked #4 in the overall smartphone camera line-up, though the organization said that it delivers better video than any other mobile device it has ever tested …
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I’ve long used Shokz bone-conduction wireless headphones as my go-to for voice and video calls, mostly because they are so comfortable I often forget I’m wearing them.
I’ve been using the OpenComm model for a couple of years now, but switched to the new OpenRun Pro 2 for a couple of reasons – one of which was fixing my only real complaint …
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Immersed Visor is a new headset aiming to fill the middle ground between simple ‘face monitors’ like the $440 Viture One XR and the self-contained $3,500 Vision Pro. Weighing about the same as an iPhone 16 Pro, it’s priced at $1,050, though there are some sketchier price models.
Like lower cost monitor-in-glasses-format products, you can’t use it as a standalone device – it’s solely intended for use as a Mac monitor – but it does offer hand-tracking and eye-tracking …
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