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 two technothriller novels , a romcom novel, and an SF novella series.
He is old enough to have owned the original Macintosh. He currently owns an M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro, a MacBook Air 11, 12.9-inch iPad Pro (LTE 256GB), iPhone 13 Pro Max (256GB), Dell Ultrawide 49-inch monitor, an Apple Watch (Series 4 WiFi) and multiple HomePods – he suspects it might be cheaper to have a cocaine habit than his addiction to all things anodised aluminum.
He thinks wires are evil and had a custom desk made to hide them, known as the OC Desk for obvious reasons.
He’s known for his op-ed and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review:
He considers 1000 miles a good distance for a cycle ride and Chernobyl a suitable tourist destination. What can we say, he’s that kind of chap.
He speaks fluent English but only broken American, so please forgive any Anglicised spelling in his posts.
If @benlovejoy-ing him on twitter, please follow him first so that he can DM you if appropriate. If you have information you can pass on, you can also email him. If you would like to comment on one of his pieces, please do so in the comments – he does read them all.
A new survey reveals that almost half of Americans have forgotten to cancel a trial subscription. It also corroborates earlier findings that we’re now spending around $1,000 a year on subscription services.
The survey comes as the FCC announced new rules ensuring that companies can’t use deceptive practices to hook us into taking out subscriptions, nor make it hard to cancel them …
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The US Commerce Department is carrying out an investigation into whether Apple chipmaker TSMC breached US sanctions against China by supplying smartphone and AI chips to Huawei. The probe was in part driven by Huawei’s surprising ability to resume competing with iPhones.
If found guilty, TSMC could potentially face sanctions which might interfere with its ability to produce future Apple chips …
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Whenever an Apple device generates a strong password for you, the structure of those secure passwords isn’t entirely random.
Instead, Apple created rules specifically designed to make them easier to type if you ever have to do that manually, and to make them briefly memorable …
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The FCC has announced new requirements for all smartphones to be compatible with all Bluetooth hearing aids, and one quirky impact is that this will include AirPods Pro 2.
It will also require iPhones to support all Bluetooth hearing aids, not just MFi ones …
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The latest Apple Store opened today in Belfast, Northern Ireland – with local schoolchildren getting access to it ahead of the opening.
The location of the store is carefully described as being “on the island of Ireland” rather than “in Ireland” …
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Including personal details in AI chats is never a good idea, given that many of them are in part trained on the content of those conversations, but there’s now another reason not to do this …
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Apple last year launched its Roadside Assistance via satellite feature in the US, intended to provide help to those stranded by car trouble in areas without mobile coverage. That service has now been quietly extended to the UK.
You’ll need an iPhone 14 or later to use the service, and you’ll need to know ahead of time how to use the feature to summon help …
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Instagram is introducing new measures to protect teens from sextortion, by making it harder for criminals to blackmail them.
Separately, it appears to be working on a new Social Library feature intended to make it easier to find posts you’ve shared, liked, or been sent in chat …
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A regulatory filing reveals that the iPad mini 7 charging speed is limited to 20W, the same as its predecessor.
This means that the device will take around an hour to charge to 70%, and about two hours to go from empty to fully-charged – significantly slower than the speeds offered by some Android tablets …
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A “click to cancel” law was last month passed in California, and now the FTC has ratified a federal rule designed to achieve the same goal.
The idea of both is to force companies to make it as easy to cancel an online or app subscription as it is to sign up in the first place. Both were introduced in response to sketchy practices by companies designed to make it as difficult as possible to unsubscribe …
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We’re expecting Apple to launch the M4 MacBook Pro by the end of the month, and supply-chain reports appear to corroborate this.
Revenue and shipment reports from three Mac suppliers suggest that production is well underway, as Apple stockpiles machines ready for launch …
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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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Update on Oct 15: The Wayback Machine went offline again yesterday, and the organization says that it is currently read-only, with no updates possible. It also says the site may need to be taken offline for further maintenance.
An Internet Archive data breach has been confirmed by the organisation, which has also been suffering Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The home of the Wayback Machine was previously attacked back in May.
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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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