Tag Archives: Apple

Attorneys Love Their iPads. Must it be $2,000 Worth of Love?

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I work with many Am Law 100 (top 100 law firms in the US) who provide iPads to their attorneys. It’s public information that many of these firms achieve millions of dollars of profit per equity partner. Investing $2,000 to enable these profit-generating attorneys to work from anywhere and to be more responsive to their elite clients is a simple calculation.

iPads are fantastic. They are portable. The Pencil is fluid. It’s quick to get to work. Try comparing your time-to-work on an iPad with loading your Citrix desktop!

But what if your firm does not quite have the budget to put a $2,000 iPad Pro kit in each of your attorneys’ hands?

In 2024, there has been a new development in the iPad family. The processor in the iPad Air is now upgraded to the Apple M2, which puts it on par with the iPad Pro 2022. I’ve traveled with the 11″ iPad Air. The light weight is a breeze, and the screen size is perfect for my needs. I love it.

I sent this brief summary (below) of iPad Pro and iPad Air pricing to a law firm IT Director who is considering buying iPads. He told me that it presents possibilities. Feel free to share it, as it may open doors for you and your firm.

Sources: Apple Website and Tom’s Guide

The 11″ iPad Air starts at $599. However, that price is with 128GB of storage and supports WiFi-only. Above, I show relative iPad prices with 512GB of storage, where available, as I would not recommend anything below 512GB. I have also shown pricing for WiFi-only and Cellular-enabled models. The pricing above does not include cellular service.

As shown, you can opt for a 13″ iPad Pro with 512GB and Cellular-enabled for $1,699.
Or, an 11″ iPad Air with 512 GB, also Cellular-enabled, is $1,049.

With any iPad, a Pencil is a must-have. The ability to take notes and mark up documents and images with a Pencil is one of the joys and conveniences of working with an iPad. The Apple Pencil Pro is $129, the Apple Pencil is $79.

I also consider a keyboard necessary for real work. The Apple brand keyboards are pricey with the Apple 13″ Magic Keyboard at $349. There are many highly rated aftermarket keyboards, starting at $39. The Zagg Pro Keyboard with Case lists at $170 (13″) and $110 (11″). They are frequently discounted at 30% off.

In summary, let’s look at two options:

13″ iPad Pro, 512GB, Cellular-enabled, Pencil Pro, aftermarket keyboard ($170) = $1,998

11″ iPad Air, 512GB, Cellular-enable, Pencil Pro, aftermarket keyboard ($110) = $1,288

The delta is ~ $700 per kit.

You don’t have to rely on my analysis – read Jeff Richardson, aka, iPhoneJD. Jeff is an appellate attorney and an avid iPad Pro user. He also writes the best product reviews that any legal user could wish for. Jeff publishes a weekly “In the News” blog which you can subscribe to and receive in your inbox every Friday morning.

Here is the summary from Jeff’s May 2024 review of the new 13″ iPad Pro. For his practice, he prefers the 13″ iPad Pro, but he recommends the iPad Air to “most attorneys.”

With the nice new improvements to the iPad Air, very few users will have a reason to say that they truly need the iPad Pro versus the iPad Air. But anyone who enjoys using an iPad and does so regularly will have a reason to want a new iPad Pro because it is simply a better overall experience. The core of using an iPad is holding a screen in your hand and interacting with it. Making the iPad thinner and lighter, making the screen better, and giving you new accessories that improve the interaction with the screen are all improvements to the most important parts of the iPad. Add to that the M4 chip for even snappier performance and the other improvements and there is simply a lot to love. I’m sure that many people will decide to save several hundred dollars and go with an iPad Air, and that is a perfectly reasonable choice. It is even the choice that I would recommend to most attorneys. But if you are OK with spending more money for a premium experience, the new iPad Pro is not just the best iPad ever, it is one of the best Apple products ever. The iPad Pro 13″ M4 is incredible.
– Jeff Richardson, iPhone J.D.

Jeff captures it well.

It’s certainly worth it to take another look at the iPad Air.

-Maureen

LINK App: New – List All Files

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Here is another fantastic feature request from a LINK user.

Sometimes you need a list of every file in a folder or even in a Workspace in iManage Work or NetDocuments DMS. Search may not help as you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. Now in LINK you can create the list, annotate it, then Air Print, email, import to iManage or NetDocuments, or save in LINK to My Files.

To create the list, tap the ellipsis icon to the right of any folder or Workspace. Tap “List All Files.”

The list is displayed.

To annotate, tap the Paper & Pencil icon and mark away.

After annotating, you can use the icons in the lower right to Air Print, email, import to iManage, or save in LINK to My Files. Or, tap the X in the upper left to get a succinct menu with options to import, email, or save to My Files.

Don’t you love it? 🙂

-Maureen

What Can You Do With the LINK App?

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If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a few thousand?

Our LINK app is so visual that we like to SHOW what it does. This video shows how LINK enables workflows for lawyers, especially document comparison and annotation.

https://vimeo.com/160181132

Apple Defies Gravity… Again

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As the story goes, the young Isaac Newton was sitting in his garden when an apple fell onto his head and, in a stroke of brilliant insight, he suddenly invented the theory of gravity.1 The story is almost certainly embellished, though it has found its place in popular culture, and has been taught to generations of young receptive science students ever since.

Winding the clock forward to 2015 brings us to a whole new and different kind of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). On January 29th Apple became the most profitable company in history. This is an incredible achievement. Examining how Apple has achieved this milestone is even more amazing.

Apple’s sales and profitability are driven by sales of the iPhone (currently 69% of revenues), and more specifically by the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. During the last quarter, Apple sold a staggering 74.5 million iPhones. This equates to 830,000 devices per day or 35,000 per hour for 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. This represents a 46% increase in iPhone sales year-on-year, while simultaneously increasing the iPhone average selling price by $50 to $687 per unit. For reference, average smartphone prices have declined from $440 in 2010 to an estimated $275 in 2015. Apple defies gravity… again, indeed.

To quote from Motley Fool2 “That Apple can deliver both massive sales volume and rising prices in the context of rapidly declining industry prices speaks wonders about Apple’s competitive differentiation and the booming popularity of its new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models”. Many congratulations to Tim Cook and the whole Apple team on this achievement.

As companies get bigger, continued rapid growth gets much, much harder. It is therefore tempting to assume that Apple’s incredible performance cannot be sustained. The Economist sums the problem up well in “Apple Reigns Supreme”.3

However, Apple’s recent history suggests otherwise. Apple will launch its much awaited (and much hyped) Apple Watch in April. Will this new device completely redefine the watch and show us all the critical things that we have been missing until now, or, will it fade as a niche luxury product that only appeals to the wealthy and tech obsessed?

No one knows for sure. We will have to wait and see. However, I suspect that we will be reading similar glowing coverage later this year as Apple Defies Gravity… Again.

Stay tuned….

– Matt

Links:

1. Isaac Newton and the apple.
2. Motley Fool on Apple’s Results.
3. The Economist – “Apple Reigns Supreme When It Comes to Making Money”.