The All-Mac Edition: The Episode For Mac-Curious Attorneys

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: So if I was starting today as the New Solo, I would do something – the entrepreneurial aspect would be – we’re going to have to change the way they’re practicing – by becoming a leader – analyzing one after another – to help young lawyers – starting a new small firm – what it means to be fulfilled – make it easy to work with your clients – bringing authenticity – new approach, new tools, new mindset, New Solo – and it’s making that leap.

Adriana Linares: Well, everyone, this is the episode all of you have been waiting for. Okay. Probably more like some of you have been waiting for, but I’m pretty excited about it. This is an all-Mac issue/special/podcast that we’re doing today. We’re going to focus on Macs, and I have two wonderful guests with me today. One of them you’ve heard from recently, Mr. Brett Burney, and another one I don’t think I’ve ever had on New Solo. So I’m very excited to welcome Jeff Richardson. Jeff, I’m going to start with you. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about yourself and your great Macness.

Jeff Richardson: Sure. This is Jeff Richardson. I am an attorney in New Orleans. I actually do not work for a solo law firm. I work for just the opposite, a large law firm called Adams and Reese, which has offices all throughout the southeastern portion of the country. But what I do know a lot about is technology and computers and stuff. I have a website called iphonejd.com, which I’ve been publishing since 2008, where I offer tips and tricks for using an iPhone and an iPad and other Apple mobile technology in your law practice.

In my personal law practice, I have gone back and forth. When I started up my law firm, we were an all-Mac law firm, which was very rare at the time and especially rare for large law firms. But we then switched in the early 2000s to a PC environment for all of the reasons that I know that we will discuss today that for large law firms, it often makes sense to have PCs. So as we sit here today, I use a Mac at home. Whenever I’m working on anything at home or playing at home, I have my Mac, I have my PC in my office and then I have my Apple mobile technology, my iPads and my iPhones. So I use a little bit of everything and can talk about just about everything. So that’s my quick little background.

Adriana Linares: Well, I think that’s a great background. And I want to congratulate you on having such an amazing long running blog that is so popular and gives so much good information for those of you that are iPhone users, iPad users, Mac users, you’ve got to go to the iphonejd.com. Subscribe and be ready for regular updates. I don’t know how you have so consistently put out. I think you do it weekly, right?

Jeff Richardson: I have posts throughout the week. But the one thing that I do regularly is every Friday, I have a post called in the News where I talk about, you know, the things that I’ve seen in the past week that might be of interest to anyone who owns an iPhone or iPad or AirPods or any of those things, which, of course, is a large portion of attorneys. And then after that post comes out every Friday, our co-host here today, Brett Burney and I record a podcast called In The News, the same title as the post where Brett and I talk and provide our commentary on the latest news that would be of interest to folks on these topics. And in fact, Brett and I just recorded our 100th episode of that podcast.

Adriana Linares: Oh my gosh.

Jeff Richardson: We were happy to get there.

Adriana Linares: I saw it. The fact that you guys have this podcast is what inspired me to have you come on and talk about take a little microcosm of everything across your platforms and all the topics, because I know I have tons of listeners that are Mac users and the more tips we can give them, the better. Brett Burney, you’re back.

Brett Burney: I’m back and happy about that. This is great. Thrilled to be back.

Adriana Linares: I’m so glad you’re here. Our last podcast, which was just a couple months ago, was on eDiscovery for small firms. And I know that was a great welcome episode by many. So real quick, in case this is the first time someone is hearing about you from New Solo, let them know who you are.

Brett Burney: I feel like I have to say that eDiscovery is like my day job, right? Like that’s the stuff that I have to do from a consulting perspective a lot of times, although that was an amazing time talking and sharing everything, Adriana, so thanks for having me there.

Adriana Linares: It was.

Brett Burney: This, though, with my podcast partner in crime. You too, Adriana. But with Jeff, this is my fun part of my job. I love – I’ve always enjoyed the technology side, just like Jeff, and we kind of nerd out together a little bit on some of these things. But, working with a lot of lawyers on the technology side and the tools that they use certainly has been iPhones, probably more than anything else, then the iPads came along. But I was fortunate to write a book for the ABA a few years ago, just based out of some work that I do, working with lawyers that wanted to use Macs, which as you guys already addressed. Hasn’t always been a lot of lawyers. In fact, it’s been a very small percentage of lawyers. But boy, is it growing these days. And it’s just becoming so much more actionable.

(00:05:00)

It’s so much more approachable today and possible for lawyers to actually use Mac. So this is a great topic. Thanks for having us on.

Adriana Linares: No, I’m happy to do it. For me, I get a lot of Mac users, no problem because most of today’s cloud-based technology is browser agnostic, device agnostic, platform agnostic. So you really can practice law with whatever platform you’d like. Sometimes you might be beholden to your IT department, like Jeff is when he’s at work, and they have reasons for that. But there’s no reason that you can’t be what I call Bi Tech. I like to call myself Bi as well.

Brett Burney: Nice.

Adriana Linares: I have my Mac sitting here. I’ve got my PC, I’ve got everything. And why not just be good at all those different versions of technology? So let’s just get that conversation out of the way real quick and just make it pretty clear that if you’re a solo or small firm starting up and loading up and you want to use a Mac, there’s very little technology today that is going to prevent you from using that. If you decide you still want to run WordPerfect, then we’re going to have a conversation. But if you decide you’re going to try to run WordPerfect on a Mac, don’t even call me. Let me put that out.

Brett Burney: Right, right. Yeah, I think you have some other problems. You need to worry about on the professional side, if you’re still looking to do WordPerfect at this point. But that’s okay. We can still embrace it. But I’m just saying.

Adriana Linares: Right. But the truth is that today’s practice management program is, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace. All of today’s basic, and then some especially legal specific technologies are cloud-based. So let’s just get that out of the way, which is if you want to practice law with a Mac, you can. The one thing I will say is if you’ve been using a PC and you’re deciding to switch to a Mac, you better be ready for a little come to Jesus party, because it’s never as easy as you think.

Brett Burney: Right.

Adriana Linares: So what I want to start by asking you, since we’ve already decided, yes, lawyers can practice law with a Mac.

Brett Burney: Yes.

Adriana Linares: Tell us a little bit about just why would I choose a Mac over a PC? And then, if you can also just to encourage people, it’s not easy. Okay? It’s a little bit of a learning curve.

Brett Burney: It’s a learning curve, exactly. Exactly.

Adriana Linares: Go ahead.

Brett Burney: I just want to quickly underscore that. I mean, one of the things that always held a lot of lawyers back several years ago from using a Mac was what I call the lack of legal specific Mac software, right? So this is when we were all running desktop applications, right? When we only had Microsoft Word, you know, on the desktop, even though a Microsoft used to make the office for the Mac as well. But it would be things like time and billing software or document management software. And those things were built for the majority of lawyers which were using Windows at the time, right? And only a very small number of those software developers would even make software for the Mac operating system, which at the time required a whole lot of other developers and resources and stuff.

But just what you’ve said a couple of times already, Adriana. Today, with cloud-based software and most everything going to the cloud, it is absolutely possible. And in fact, I am continuing to see more and more lawyers starting to use the Mac just because it is so popular on that. But then now to get to your other question and Jeff can jump in here as well. You know, there are several reasons. The main ones that I continue to see today that people would come to me and say can I use a Mac in my practice?

Number one is what I call the halo effect, from things like the iPhone and the iPad. So people – lawyers may be using Windows computers in their practice but they may also be using an Apple iPhone. They’ve been using an iPhone for several years. They love it, it just works. Everything works great. They got an iPad, because they love the iPhone so much. Maybe they got an Apple Watch. They’ve gone to the Apple stores, the physical Apple stores and they appreciate the fact they can talk to somebody, they can get help right there and they come to me and say I want that. I want that entire experience for my computers. I want my computer to just work. I’m frustrated with it. So that’s number one.

And in a kind of a side note to that, a lot of times, Adriana, people will come to me and say listen, I have to use a Windows computer at my work, because maybe similar to Jeff, that’s the only option. But, they have a child that is going to college, and what do you think that child’s going to get and take with them a Mac?

Adriana Linares: Mac.

Brett Burney: A Mac. Or they have a kid maybe that’s in grade school or ever the fact or they want their home computer and many times they will get a Mac. And because, they enjoy using their Mac so much in their home life, and their kids life, again, they come and say, I want that in my work life as well. And so those are some of the main reasons that I see people come to me and asking about, can I actually use a Mac in my law practice?

Jeff Richardson: This is a particularly good time too to start using a Mac if you don’t already do so. You know, I’m very happy at my law firm. But if for some reason Adams and Reese told me tomorrow, “Hey, Jeff, open up your own practice.” The first thing that I would do is get a Mac, because there’s no way in the world I would use a PC if I had control over my own technology.

(00:10:00)

And the reason I say, this is a good time to do it, is because years and years ago with the iPhone, Apple decided that rather than use some of the microprocessors that were made by third parties, companies like Intel and stuff, that they would make their own chips so that they could make sure that the processors were tuned to what Apple wanted them to do in the iPhone and in the iPad. And on the computer side, in just the last few years, Apple is now starting to use their chips. So Apple’s no longer using the Intel chips that you find in many Windows computers and they’re using their own chips.

And as a practical matter, what that means for the user is for the same amount of money, you’re getting a computer that is often a little more powerful, but is always much better on battery life. And so when you have a laptop computer as people want to use, if you compare, just put them right next to each other, the typical Windows computers with the same set of features and the typical Mac computer, you’re getting a lot more bang for the buck. Now, things change over time and maybe five years from now Intel will have the next best thing. But there’s no question that right now you’re getting much better deal with the Mac.

But then in addition to that, I mean, the thing that I – you know, why I love using a Mac at home and wish I could use it all the time is something that Brett alluded to. It’s just the seamless integration. I love using my iPhone. I love using my iPad. And when I’m sitting here at work, I can have my Windows computer with me and I can have my iPad right next to me. And they sort of function independently, but they don’t really talk to each other that much. Whereas, when I’m sitting down at my Mac at home, for example, I happen to use a desktop computer. I can literally, just to take one example, take my mouse cursor on my Mac, and as I go off the end of the screen and move over to the iPad next to me, the cursor just moves right over there and the keyboard that I was using with my Mac suddenly becomes the keyboard for my iPad.

I mean, that’s one of a million examples, but it just shows how seamlessly the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and the computer, the Mac all work together. And considering that even Windows using computers – even attorneys excuse me, that use Windows, even they are using, for the most part iPhones and iPads, if you’re already using those sorts of things, it’s sort of a natural transition to why not go to something that it’s all sort of been working together and integrating.

Adriana Linares: When you’re talking to attorneys that might come to you and say, “hey, I’m thinking about switching to a Mac”, have you found – and I’m going to guess the answer is probably no – that there’s a particular practice area or type of attorney that is better suited for a Mac than another?

Brett Burney: I would say no, not today. But here’s the thing, there’s always going to be probably a tiny little exception, right? And that’s one of the things that I always tell people when they come to me, Adriana, to say, “you can use a Mac.” The answer is yes, you can use a Mac in your law practice. Absolutely. However, there’s a few little caveats that you just need to make sure that you can control, because you are going to still be a little bit of the exception when it comes to this. So, for example, the thing that comes to mind, there’s an attorney down in North Carolina, Ben Stevens, who formerly had the website the maclawyer.com. I don’t think that he still maintains it, but for several years he was even profiled in the ABA journal several years ago about how he uses a Mac. Well, he did family law in the state.

I’m sorry, I said North Carolina. Maybe it’s South Carolina. I can’t remember. What are the Carolinas? Is it South Carolina, Jeff? I think it is. But in that particular state, they required all family lawyers to use a specific software for, I think it was a child calculator, something like that, right?

Adriana Linares: Sure. There’s still some of those.

Brett Burney: Exactly, there is. And you know, you run into this. But that’s very specific, very niche. But in that case, I know I’ve talked to Ben many times. He had to have a Windows computer. Everybody in his office was Mac, but he had to have one little old Windows computer running in the corner, because of this one specific set of software.

Now, there’s not as much of that today as there was several years ago, but there still is going to be something that you’re going to have to run into that you will run into from those aspects, even just from that. Again, I call it like you’re the exception, right, when you’re using a Mac. Not in a negative way, but in the sense that you got to make sure if you create something in the page’s software, that’s a Word document or a Word processing document. Well, your Windows colleagues can’t open that, right? So you need to make sure you use Microsoft Word or convert it into Word. It’s just little things like that just to make sure that you know that you’re not in the majority.

I mean, from all the surveys we had, for ABA mostly, and some of the ILTA surveys and stuff, the best guess that we have today is about 10 to 12% of lawyers are using Macs, and the rest are all Windows. Now, those surveys are a little old these days, and I can tell you from an anecdotal perspective, I think I’m pretty sure we’re much higher than that.

(00:15:00)

Not way higher, but probably 15 to 20%, I would think, I would guess today. Just from what I have seen, that people are coming on. So it’s not unheard of, and it certainly has been growing for a lot of the reasons that we’ve already discussed a little bit here.

Adriana Linares: Let me give you an interesting statistic. What do you call it when it’s real science data? Is that empirical data? Is that what it’s called.

Brett Burney: Sure.

Adriana Linares: Is that it?

Brett Burney: I just call it real science data. That’s what I like.

Adriana Linares: Okay. Let me give you guys some real science data. So I run the tech helpline for the Florida Bar, and I keep really good track of my calls, including preferred platform is one of the questions I ask when someone goes to make an appointment. So I have to ask them. I have had over the phone, we have done 307 phone consultations, let’s say 300. We have done about 97 that’s in the past two years. Hold on, about 100 text chats. So let’s say, I have 400 entries from lawyers who have to tell me what platform they prefer before they’re able to make an appointment or get a chat or anything else. And then I have a pretty pie chart that tells us the preferred OS of my 400 or so interactions with Florida attorneys, 78 are on PC/Windows 78%, Apple and Mac is then going to be about 16 is their preferred.

But, I have a mixed option, so I have a mix like Jeff, I have PCs and Macs. That’s the other percentage, which leaves us at about five. I think you can go with more of a 20% to maybe 22% of attorneys that are using Macs. Then the last thing I’ll say about that is my boyfriend took the Florida Bar about four years ago. He had taken the New York Bar 30 years ago, took the California Bar 30 years ago, took Florida Bar about four years ago, and then took the Louisiana Bar about three years ago. When he was in the Florida Bar, there was 2000 people taking that exam in there. He is not kidding when he’s told me he was the only PC in that entire room.

So if there are not enough Mac lawyers now, Mac using lawyers, it’s growing and I often tell software developers, specifically NetDocuments, which is one of my favorite products out there. Y’all better develop for the Mac, because it is a wave coming and it’s already started. So I think those are just so interesting. Those numbers and I get from these same callers. I use a PC at work but I’ve got a Mac at home. Jeff?

Jeff Richardson: Yeah. One thing I would say about that, though, Adriana, is that the number of people that are calling the helpline to talk to you, it sounds to me like by definition, that’s somebody that needs help with something. And that’s one of the areas where when you talk about the type of attorney that should use a Mac versus a PC, you know, one of the advantages or disadvantages of the PC these is that they are much easier to run for administrators. They’re much easier for the tech people to administer. So if it was my job to administer 100 or 1000 computers, I might prefer the tools that I as the tech administrator could have with PCs versus Macs, because Macs aren’t a set up for that.

But on the flip side, from the standpoint of the user, if you want something that you can try to figure things out yourself. I’m not saying that there aren’t times when it can be confusing to find something on the Mac, but it’s often far easier to figure something out on your own on the Mac than the PC. So you just need to decide, do I want to be the sort of attorney that has even if I’m a solo attorney that has maybe an outside IT department that I work with, and if so, then that can help me and maybe that’d be a reason to have the PC. Or would I prefer to be the sort of attorney that can just take care of things myself and figure things out myself? Because the Mac is going to be better for that.

And then one other thing I wanted to mention is that Brett was talking about the vertical software, which is sometimes still an issue, that this particular program has to be used. I’ve been practicing law since 1994 and I used to see that a lot more in the early 2000s. But over the last two decades, I’ve noticed, and I’m sure the other two of you have as well. So much of the software world has moved from the specific program you run on your computer to something that’s online. And so nowadays, whether it’s accounting software or eDiscovery software or legal research software, the best is always the online service. And what’s fantastic about that from the choice of computer is when it’s a Web based interface, you can use it on your Mac, you can use it on a PC, you can use it on your iPad, you can use it on your iPhone. And so it means that you have a lot more ability to choose the platform that you prefer because it’s not going to matter. It’s just not going to matter because it’s all web based.

Adriana Linares: I want to ask both of you one more question before we stop for a quick break. And that has to do with running Parallels or is there still another thing like Parallels? There used to be two.

Brett Burney: No, yeah. There used to be VMware fusion, and they let that go. But Parallels is still strong, and there’s a couple of others that CodeWeavers is another one. But yeah, it’s not –

Jeff Richardson: Wine.

Brett Burney: Yeah, exactly. It’s not quite as robust as it once was.

Adriana Linares: Okay. So let me just explain very quickly in case someone doesn’t know. Parallels has been around for a million years, and what it allowed you to do was create a virtual Windows machine that you could switch to on your Mac.

(00:20:00)

So basically, Mac would take a little piece of its hard drive and it would dedicate it to running a fake version of Windows. And then attorneys would or anyone would be able to sort of flip over to a Windows machine within their Mac. And the program that is well-known is called Parallels. My question to the both of you today is, is that even worth it anymore? Or do you just, like you said, Brett, go buy a $300 Windows machine at Costco and set it on the side for when you need that one little program? Because I feel like in the old days, and I’m going to look to the both of you to tell me if it’s gotten better. Parallels really weighed heavy on machines. It created a lot of other issues. It was hard, actually, to run it. So what’s happening today with something like Parallels?

Brett Burney: Yeah. Is it still worth it? Probably for something specific like that, like we’re talking about Adriana. But honestly, I got to tell you, it’s been a long time, several years now, since I’ve even run any of that for Windows virtualization software on my computer. And just to back up a little bit from some history perspective, several years ago, before 2006, all of the Macintosh computers ran an IBM processor, right? So this was before Intel. So that was a huge change in 2006, I believe it was. Jeff, right?

When Apple said, “hey, we are going to stop using IBM processors, we’re going to use Intel processors.” Now, for the rest of – most of the professional world, we’re like, “okay, whatever”. But for us, that was huge because, again, in that time period, there were versions of Windows software that we wanted to run on the Mac, and that’s exactly how we did it. In fact, Apple even supported this. They had a little software application called Boot Camp, that when you turned on –

Adriana Linares: That’s the other one I was thinking of.

Brett Burney: Exactly. Now, that was Apple saying. When you turned on your Macintosh computer, you could decide, do I want to boot into the Mac side or do I want to boot into the Windows computer? Which was crazy because that was my best Windows computer. That was my best Windows laptop that I was using. And it had an Apple on the front of it. It was just kind of weird and odd how this worked, but that’s how I would do. Like trial presentation software, for example. That was only Windows software. I would use a Mac booted into Windows.

Now, all of that has come full circle now because several years ago, Apple stopped using Intel processors in the computer. In fact, it was just a couple of weeks ago that all of their Macintosh computers are now running Apple’s own processors. Jeff alluded to this to where Intel is left in the dust, and Apple has just gone gangbusters with their own silicon. We call it Apple silicon just because they’re doing it all in house. And it is amazing. Now, Parallels will still run on M1 or M2 processor Macs, but it’s not quite as robust as it once was. Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff Richardson: Yeah, you’re right, Brett, with one caveat, which is that. And I’m not running Parallels today. But from what I remember reading recently, Windows, of course, doesn’t just work on Intel. Windows can also work on ARM machines, and the current Mac computers are sort of a version of ARM. I thought I read that Parallels reached an agreement with Microsoft that Parallels was going to be able to offer you the Windows ARM experience. And a lot of this is technical mumbo jumbo.

What it basically means is that, Parallels will be able to run even on the current Macs that have a Mac processor just as efficiently as they used to run in the old days on the Intel, where it was, of course, nice because everybody used Intel. So I actually think that Parallels is a real option for the one or two times when you just need to use the specific PC specific program. And I’ll mention one more thing, too, and I don’t know if folks get into this. I don’t know for how many folks this is applicable, but it’s something that I personally do quite a bit.

I have my PC at my office that I keep plugged in and turned on all the time. And when I’m at home, I’m using my Mac. I will sometimes connect to my Windows PC from a Mac or for that matter, from an iPad or even an iPhone using Remote Access Software. And Microsoft has its own Remote Access Software, which works very well. I also use a product called LogMeIn, which does the same thing. And so I will often be at home, and I can be doing some work on my Mac.

But then for the very rare time that I need to access, like some system, document management system that just I don’t have a clean interface on my Mac, I can just connect to my office PC. And even though the office PC is not at my home, I can just connect virtually to it and do what I need to do. And so these sorts of options, whether it’s using Parallels or Remote Access, you can use them for the specific situations so that you’re not limited by the Mac. And then you get all of the other advantages of the Mac that you never get on the PC. So it all depends upon how geeky you want to be and how specialized you want to be, but you can get it done using those options.

Adriana Linares: It’s definitely a lot of options. Well, let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors. We’ll be right back, and we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of the actual tools and services that you guys recommend for attorneys to have on their Macs. We’ll be right back.

(00:25:00)

[Music]

I was reading Clio’s legal trends for solo law firms recently and was surprised, or maybe not so surprised, to see that 52% of non-solos are still not taking online payments. I’ve asked Joshua Lenon, Clio’s lawyer in residence, to hop on here and help me understand what could be the holdup. Hi, Josh.

Joshua Lenon: Hi, Adriana. You’re right. Solos are actually taking the lead. They are 58% more likely to be using an online payment solution. And this lines up with what clients prefer. 66% of them prefer to pay for legal services online. So non-solos are falling behind.

Adriana Linares: Well, this makes perfect sense to me. Even I don’t want to write checks anymore. So, to learn more about how Clio can improve your payment process, be sure to download Clio’s Legal Trends for solo law firms for free at clio.com/solo. And that’s C-L-I-O.com/solo.

All right. I am back with Jeff Richardson and Brett Burney, my two Mac gurus. Actually, I have a third. I should always mention that Ernest Fenton is my third Mac guru.

Brett Burney: Yeah.

Adriana Linares: Good old Ernie.

Brett Burney: Ernie the attorney. The Mac attorney.

Adriana Linares: We’ve got it. So there’s a great group of consultants and lawyers using Macs out there that can help attorneys with conversations and questions just like this. So, guys, what I want to ask you about next is hardware. So here’s my question. Of those tech helpline calls I get, or the consults I do for San Diego or even Nebraska, someone might say, I’m getting ready to start a new practice. What should I get as far as specs for my PC? And typically, I don’t have a brand that I love, but there are two things that I hit very specifically. That is RAM, meaning you’ve got to have a minimum of 16, 32 is good, 64 megs is the best, which is what I get. And the processor average user isn’t going to tell the difference between an i5 and an i9 Intel processor, but I’ll say, bulb prices are the same. Take the i9, hard drive specs kind of don’t matter as much because you keep most of the stuff in the cloud.

So, question for you, let me start with Brett and give me some laptop specs. And then I’m going to ask Jeff to switchover and say, “well, if you prefer a desktop, here’s what you want to look for.” And maybe the answers are all the same. But Brett, I’m calling you up, and saying, “hey Brett, I’m starting solo practice. I’ve got a limited budget and what should I look? Just kidding. I’ve got all the budget in the world.” Which I will tell you, when an attorney asks me what should I spend on a PC or a Mac, I’m like the most you can spend because there’s one thing you should never skimp on and that’s your infrastructure and your technology.

Brett Burney: Exactly.

Adriana Linares: So do not cheap out.

Brett Burney: Thank you.

Adriana Linares: So Brett, I’m looking for a laptop. The minimum specs I want to get in order to have hold on average attorney, 58 PDF files open, 60, 70 tabs open in Chrome, 50 tabs open, in Safari, 14 Word documents open, maybe an Excel spreadsheet, Trello open and who knows what else. Minimum specs for a laptop.

Brett Burney: None of that is going to scare a modern-day Mac.

Adriana Linares: Love it.

Brett Burney: At all. Because mainly of the M1 processor or the M2 processor today, that’s the biggest thing. So I got to go back and just underscore a couple of those things that you were saying, because this is what Tom and I wrote. Tom Lambot and I wrote in the book, it’s Macs in Laws, the ABA book that we wrote, and we talked exactly about that, Adriana. And I know that you’re a firm believer in this. I don’t understand why lawyers want to spend as least as possible, as less as possible on a computer when this is your tool. This is where you get all of your work done today. This is what you need to invest in.

Now, one of the big things I would tell you quickly and I’m sure people listening are already saying this. I don’t do a Mac, it’s too expensive. They’re way too expensive. I understand where you’re coming from. And maybe, if you compared Apples to Apples or PCs to Apples, if you actually compared the actual specs that you’re talking about Adriana, between a full PC, if you get it from compact or Lenovo or wherever you get it from Dell compared to what you get from a Mac, you’re going to be very close. If you go and want to spend $300 at Costco, you’re going to get a $300 laptop. That’s only going to last you maybe for a year. You’re going to get so frustrated and waste so much time working on that that it’s not ever going to pay for itself. So invest in something that’s going to last.

So now, getting back to the laptops on the Mac, I mean, number one, you have one choice, right? This is the whole thing with the Windows side. You have one company that does the software, Microsoft. But you have a vast majority of companies you can pick from on what you want to pick for a laptop.

(00:30:00)

Good luck, have fun. Some people like that, and I understand there’s a market for that. But, if you go to the Apple side, guess what? You have one choice. You have one choice for the software and the same choice for the hardware as well. Some people don’t like that. It’s a monopoly, whatever. I understand if that’s your choice on there, but it does make it easy, Adriana, and a lot of people just want it because there’s a lot of benefits that come to that and advantages in the sense that the hardware and the software are so well integrated with the Mac. And that’s one of the big things that I know makes a big difference.

On the laptop side, you basically have two options today with the Mac. You have the MacBook Air, which is sort of like the slim line version, and really, to be honest, is more than enough for the vast majority of lawyers that need or want to get a Mac laptop. That’s your starter area. Then we do have the MacBook Pro. Now, I like using the MacBook Pro, but I tend to do quite a bit of video editing and audio editing, not just in the editing itself, but like when I’m processing that video out, right?

Adriana Linares: Right.

Brett Burney: That takes a lot of horse power. I do a lot of OCR on a big number of files, not just one or two PDF files. I’m talking like, I’ve got a collection of 200 files. I need to run OCR on. It’s those things that take a lot of overhead, require a lot of overhead to get through, to churn through. So I chose to go with a MacBook Pro. And this is what I talk with a lot of lawyers, Adriana. I talk to lawyers like, you’re not doing video editing?

Adriana Linares: What I’m doing, right.

Brett Burney: Right. You’re not doing this day in and day out. You’re going to Lexus. You’re maybe using word. Maybe you have the 58 PDF files open. That’s okay. We don’t care about that. That’s not a problem. The MacBook Air is probably going to be fine. And Apple just released a 15 inch. There was the 13 inch with the M1, and now there’s a 15 inch version out there. The great thing is you can go to the apple.com, you can look at all the specs. If we want to get into how many cores the GPU and the CPU have and how much memory, but it’s very, almost exactly similar to what you were just saying, Adriana. At least 16 gigs of RAM and then go up from there, 32, 64, that’s fine. If you want to push it all in there, that’s totally fine. You’re doing what I usually call future proofing it, right. It’s going to last you at least three, four, five years. No problems whatsoever. It starts with 512 gigs. You can go up to a terabyte if you want.

Adriana Linares: And that’s for storage.

Brett Burney: That’s for storage.

Adriana Linares: So let me just interrupt you real quick to explain this. There’s two types of memory and RAM that you guys will hear about when you go to look at laptops. There’s RAM and then there’s storage. Okay? So the smaller number that we’ve mentioned, like eight, don’t ever get eight.

Brett Burney: No, not today.

Adriana Linares: 16, 32 and 64 everyone.

Brett Burney: You can’t. You can’t get eight.

Adriana Linares: That’s the most important part of your machine. That is what keeps things in memory, keeps things close, pulls things up fast, makes your computer run faster. Well, it’s really the processor. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s just say, you need a lot of RAM.

Brett Burney: Right.

Adriana Linares: Then what Brett just mentioned, when he says 512, 1TB, that’s the size of the hard drive. That’s the storage space. How many pictures, movies, videos, files can you store on there on top of all the programs that you load onto the local machine? So I’m finding that today most attorneys can have about half a gig, 512. But if you get a terabyte, you’re fine. Sometimes you get two. Okay, so, Brett, you either get a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

Brett Burney: Right.

Adriana Linares: The MacBook Pro might be, if you’re doing much more robust processing, like you mentioned, videos, maybe you watch a lot of movies. I don’t think that matters, but you’re actually doing a lot of processing. Minimum of 16GB of RAM, size of the hard drive is going to be up to you. Can you talk to me real quick about ports? Because I feel like every laptop I look at today, PC or Mac, I’m just getting less and less ports and it makes me want to cry.

Brett Burney: They are, they are. And in fact, the MacBook Air has less ports than the MacBook Pro.

Adriana Linares: Has one.

Brett Burney: Yeah, exactly. And that’s a USB-C port, right. So because it’s so nice and thin and very portable, that means that there’s not very many ports on there. It’s not USB-A. That’s the typical USB port that we think of. This is USB-C, which is a little smaller.

Adriana Linares: You guys, listeners, this is really important for you to consider.

Brett Burney: It is.

Adriana Linares: How much stuff do you need to plug in? And let me tell you, I plug in all sorts of things, whether it’s a laptop or a PC. I like an external camera. I like a headset. Maybe you’ve got a scanner that you want to carry around with you. So, Brett, tell us a little bit about that. So if you’re going to go with the MacBook Air, you get one port. With the MacBook Pro, you probably get four or three.

Brett Burney: Yeah, actually – so on the MacBook air, there are two USB-C ports. You got a power port, and then you have a headphone jack. That’s it. That’s all you get on the MacBook Air. But I will say this, that’s limiting if you do plug a bunch of stuff in.

(00:35:00)

But Adriana, as you know, a lot of people will do these days –

Adriana Linares: What’s the solution?

Brett Burney: —the USB-C port will handle a whole lot of throughput. It’s got a lot of bandwidth. So what a lot of people do is they just go to Amazon and they get a USB-C hub, right? So that I have one of these that I can plug in multiple USB thumb drives and mice and keyboards and whatever else that I might need at that point. So a lot of people will get around it that way. But, you know, for me, I’m the same way as you do Adriana. I do podcast recording, I do video, I do a lot of stuff that most typical lawyers are not doing. And so having – I have three USB ports and an HDMI port on my MacBook Pro. The HDMI port is great because I do a lot of presentations, right, as you know, Adriana. So I like to have that port available there as opposed to having it on a hub, which I’m not going to get on the MacBook Air. So, again, these are just some of the things that I would talk with the lawyer.

Adriana Linares: Important things to consider.

Brett Burney: Right. Understand what are your typical needs, what do you do as you go through the day? I will find though, Adriana, a lot of people just say, well, I just want the best. Just give me the best, right? If we convince them like we have, like, you need to invest in this, then they go for the MacBook Pro. That’s okay. But as you know, most of the time, you’re never going to reach like, the full breadth of what that laptop can do and that’s okay. It’s just know that, you know, you’re probably spending maybe a little bit more than you need to, but that’s okay as well, because that is going to be something that’s going to future proof for a while.

Adriana Linares: Okay. The last thing I’m going to say just to help listeners understand when Brett says a hub, here’s what you can think of it. Like I call it a dongle. You’ll hear us old schoolers also call it a dongle.

Brett Burney: I feel like I’m a little more PC in my word, the hub.

Adriana Linares: No, we’re PG-13 rated here in New Solo.

Brett Burney: Okay, great. Good.

Adriana Linares: So everyone, imagine how you run out of plugs at your outlets in the wall at home and you go and you get a surge protector that has 15 more plugs that you can plug in. That’s literally what we are talking about for Macs or for PCs. When you don’t have enough ports, you can buy a USB hub. You should buy it the minute you’re buying the laptop. Just order the hub or the dongle and they usually come with four or five or six and then you will not be frustrated by having to unplug your mouse if you happen to still use a corded mouse in order to use your microphone. So you’re definitely going to want that. They’re only a few dollars. 15, $18 off of Amazon. Okay, so we’ve got some good basics there for laptops. Let’s talk about desktops, but before we do that, Jeff, do you have anything you want to add on about laptops?

Jeff Richardson: I do, because I think most attorneys are going to probably want a laptop computer over a desktop computer. I’ll get to a desktop computer in one second, but I think that you have more choices with a laptop that you can take around with you. And so as Brett said, the nice thing from the Apple side is you only have to choose between the two models, the Air and the Pro. And although the Pro is hundreds of dollars, it can be up to a similar system. There are some real advantages that I think you should think of. First of all, is the display. The display on the MacBook Air is nice. It’s really nice. The display on the MacBook Pro is much nicer. So once you start using a MacBook Air display, it’s a brighter display, it’s a more colorful display. If you’re going to be working with photos and stuff like that, it’s really nice. If you start spending too much attention with the MacBook Pro display and you go back to the Air, you’re going to say, “I’m sort of missing out here a little bit.” So that’s something to think about.

Another good point is in terms of ports. On the MacBook Air, you have the two Thunderbolt USB ports, but they’re on the same side. It’s on, I believe, the left side. And I know that this seems silly, but sometimes when you’re setting up your laptop computer, it would be more convenient to have that port on the right side than on the left side. And the advantage of the MacBook Pro is it gives you three USB-C Thunderbolt ports, but one of them, you have them on both sides. And that sounds like such a silly thing, but believe me, when you’re in a hotel or you’re moving around, it just makes a lot more sense to have them aside. Plus, the MacBook Pro has the HDMI port, so if you ever give presentations or you’re connecting it to a monitor in a courtroom or something like that, you can do it with the Air, but you have to have a little dongle to do it. Whereas with the Pro, you’ve got the HDMI built in and you also have the SD cord built in, the SD card port built in, if some cameras use that and stuff. So you just have those more powerful features with the Pro versus the Air.

Aside from a lot of that stuff, though, as long as they are both using the latest M2 processor, they’re going to be about the same speed. So from that standpoint, it’s not a lot of compromises to go with the Air, but the Pro does have some extra things. And then one more thing I wanted to say, if you’re moving from PC to Mac, you’re absolutely right, Adriana, that memory is important. And many people may say, “gosh, I have 16 gigs of memory on my PC and I find it pretty limited. So I guess I need 32 on the Mac.” And I’m here to tell you that’s actually not true. One of the things that the M2 Macs offer, and this is different from the old days when the Macs used to use the same Intel processors that Windows computers still use.

(00:40:00)

But nowadays, the Macs are so much faster when they get short on memory and swapping out from the SSD, which we sometimes still call the hard drive. But it’s not really a hard drive, it’s a solid-state drive now. It’s so fast that you can actually get by with less memory. And to show you that, to put the proof, is where the putting? My home computer, which I’ll get to in a second as we transfer into talking about desktop computers. My prior home computer had 32 gigs of memory. And when I just recently this year purchased a new home computer, I actually went down to 16 gigs. And if you had asked me in the past, Jeff, would you ever go down versus up, I would have said, what are you crazy? Why would I ever do that? But the reality is that for me, instead of spending the extra memory, the extra money on the memory, I put that extra money towards getting an even larger SSD drive, which for me was a better value. Because having less RAM, I can get by.

Now, I will still offer a caveat, which is you can buy a very low-end MacBook Air with only eight gigs of memory. And I do think that’s a little limited. It’s probably fine for a kid that’s in high school or something like that, which is what it’s geared for. But for professional work, I would go with 16 for sure and then 32 if you want to splurge. But anyway, so those are my extra thoughts that I wanted to offer on the laptop computer comparisons and why you might want to get one versus the other.

Adriana Linares: I think you’re right that most attorneys are going to go for a laptop before they bother with a desktop. So real quick, Brett, I think you had the pages pulled up for these. Can you tell me just kind of an Apples to Apples HAHA. Average price of an Air versus a Pro. And then for those of us who weight really matters on the stuff we carry around, what’s the difference in weight between the two? Because the MacBook – I have a MacBook Pro here and it’s significantly heavier than my MacBook Air.

Brett Burney: It is. Yeah so I say for the MacBook Air and Jeff you can at it too and double check me on this.

Jeff Richardson: I haven’t.

Brett Burney: I mean you’re going to be — I would say for everything we are talking about for a MacBook Air you’re probably going to at the very lowest level maybe $1,200 is what I would say. That’s what you’re going to be looking at and you’re probably depending on what other things that you might want to add on that. It could be upwards of 1,500 even 1600 something like that.

On the MacBook Pro depending on the size like there’s a 13-inch MacBook Pro, 14 inch and a 16 inch depending on this, on the screen size that you want to look at there and those start at 1300, 2,000 and 2,500 respectively. So that just gives you the idea that’s the very base model and that doesn’t mean that your skimping on much of the stuff. But just to give you an idea.

For a MacBook Pro, for most lawyers that I work with, you’re going to be looking at over $2,000, maybe 2,200, 2,300 is what I would say. What do you say Jeff?

Jeff Richardson: Yeah, that’s exactly, right. I mean you’re going to be spending 500 to a thousand dollars more for the MacBook Pro when you all put it together.

Adriana Linares: Okay.

Jeff Richardson: It’s not directly apples to apples comparison because they’re different sizes like for example the MacBook Air comes in a 13 and a 15, whereas the MacBook Pro comes with a 14 and a 16. I’m talking about screen size. So you are getting more and so for example the lightest if you just want the lightest thing to carry around the MacBook Air is the lightest but in part that’s because it’s the smallest, right, the 13 inch screen and so it’s going to only weigh 2.7 pounds whereas the smallest MacBook Pro is going to be about a pound more, 3.5 pounds.

But again it’s not the extra weight is not just the Pro in the name, the extra weight is also a 14-inch versus a 13-inch screen.

Brett Burney: Right.

Jeff Richardson: And so but for some people signs and weight are the most important things for them and they don’t mind using a dongle if they need HTMI and they don’t mind plugging in only on one side of the computer, not the other. So do not get me wrong, the Air is a great computer and in the old days getting the Air meant that you’re getting a less processor oompf, those days are over.

Adriana Linares: Long on.

Jeff Richardson: And it’s wonderful that you can have all of the same power with that smaller form factor if that’s what matters the most to you.

Brett Burney: I would just quickly say just going to get to the desktop but I’m always, always, always tell folks that I talk to, I’m happy to give you some recommendations. I’m happy to give you some pointers and some best tips but if you possibly can, I know sometimes it’s not an Apple, physical Apple Store close to you but it would even be worth an hour or two hour drive and I’d say I’ve don’t it before.

Adriana Linares: For sure.

Brett Burney: What’s so great about Apple’s approach on this, when they open these physical stores Adriana and you’ve and many people have been in them of course, they have everything on display, like you touch it, you play with it, you can type on it, you can open the Microsoft Word, it’s like they don’t stop you from just fondling it as much as you want to and I tell people go pick it up, open it, close it, put it in your briefcase, they let you do some of that right there.

Adriana Linares: Yeah.

Brett Burney: And that is the best thing that you’re going to do before you actually make a purchase on there. I mean don’t have to buy it there. They don’t care.

(00:45:02)

Adriana Linares: They don’t.

Brett Burney: You can just go back and go to apple.com and buy it later or whatever the case may be. But I always say all of this that we’re talking about please before you make the purchase, go and look at it yourself and compare the screens if you need to, compare the weight and what’s going to feel best for you.

Adriana Linares: Okay. For real this is the last thing I want to say about laptops and then we’re going to switch to desktops. For all of you listening going $2,300 for a Mac, that’s crazy. I spent $2,300 on my last PC laptop. So if you really want high end you’re going to, like Jeff said earlier, we are going to pay the same.

One more consideration I would make in the screen sizes because it does make a big difference. If you travel a lot and you’re on airplanes working a lot that 13 inch monitor is way better and easier to put on the desktop tray in front of you than a 14 inch. So there are a lot of things that you have to consider, and I think Brett, you give the best advice of going and touching and tapping and feeling things out.

Jeff, tell us about desktops if we’re even going to bother, because I know that most attorneys are just going to move their laptop between places. I’m crazy. I like to have the laptop everywhere. So I just bought three laptops from Ernie the Attorney a couple, a few months ago and I’ve got one in LA, I’ve got one in Orlando, so it just depends on how you’re going to run your business.

So Jeff, what do you say about desktops for us?

Jeff Richardson: Yeah, so and even though most attorneys use laptops, the Mac that I own is a desktop computer. There’s currently four different desktop computers you can buy for the Mac. There is the iMac, which is the one that has the screen built-in.

Adriana Linares: Okay, the only one.

Jeff Richardson: There’s the Mac Mini, there’s the Mac Studio, which is like a Mac Mini but a little bit bigger because it’s got a lot more power in it and then finally there’s the very high-end Mac Pro but I’m not going to get into details in all four of them because frankly I’m just going to cut to the chase. If you’re an attorney, the one that you want is the Mac Mini.

The iMac currently uses the older M1 processor, doesn’t have the M2 and it’s got a smaller screen. The one to get is the Mac Mini which frankly is the one that I purchased earlier this year. Now, when you get a Mac Mini it’s nice because it’s a very small, it’s about the size of an Apple TV if you have one of those. It’s a small little box that’s got the ports on the back of it and stuff and it doesn’t come with the monitor so you need to get a monitor. And so the decision that you need to make once you get your Mac Mini is you can either get a cheap monitor like a Dell monitor or something you can find at Best Buy that frankly isn’t going to look great, but it’s going to probably be okay. And I’m talking to you right now on my work monitor which is one of those just okay Dell monitor and I can write brief just fine on it.

On the other hand, home computer where I have like my photos that I take with the kids and I want to look at them in full screen and have them look as good as possible, I’m willing to spend the extra money on a nice monitor, and Apple currently sells a monitor called the Studio of Display monitor, which is very, very nice.

So, like choose how much you want to spend on the monitor but for the computer itself, what you want to get is the Mac Mini and then the decisions you’ll make is how much memory I went for 16 if you want to splurge, go for 32, but 16 should be fine, how much storage you want and as you said Adriana for some people 512 is enough because I personally knew that in addition to some work stuff, I wanted to be able to put my photos and my videos and that’s on it. I decided to go all the way up to 4 terabytes, which is a lot of space, but that cost me like an extra thousand dollars to put the 4 terabytes on there, but that was for me personally that was worth it.

And there’s not really many other decisions to make. So that’s what I would get. If you’re an attorney and you want to choose a desktop, get the Mac Mini.

Adriana Linares: Great. Well, that was very succinct. All right guys, let’s take a quick break. Listen, to some messages from some sponsors and when we come back, we’re going to talk about software. We will be right back.

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(00:50:11)

All right, we are having a great discussion. This is the Mac special podcast. I’ve got Jeff Richardson and Brett Burney here. We talked a little bit about just general Macs and why, and why not and pretty much decided that just about anybody can practice law or anything else with the Mac perfectly well today.

We went through some hardware options and now I want to talk a little bit about software, kind of like you were saying about hardware or at least a platform you have one choice. So you’re going to get Mac OS with your desktops and you’re going to get the iOS platforms with your mobile devices. So what are a couple of the main things like features as far as the OS goes that maybe you can compare to a PC or is better than a PC or just anything we need to know specifically about the operating systems.

Brett Burney: Well, yeah, it’s a kind of bring it back full circle. You mentioned this at the very beginning Adriana that, there is a little bit of a learning curve. Apple has done a very good job over the years of the phrase everybody knows it just works, right, it just works and Macs do just work. But if you have been using Windows computers for a long time, there are some differences that are just little speed bumps, right. You need to make sure that you get over them. They’re not showstoppers they’re just speed bumps.

For example, I’m looking at my keyboard right now on my Mac and we’re normally on a Windows keyboard, it would say backspace it says delete. Well delete to me means forward delete, right as opposed to backspace. I know this is nitpicky but I going to tell you sometimes that would trip me up. It’s like, wait a minute, how do I do this?

Another thing to be honest –

Adriana Linares: Wait, wait, how do you do that?

Brett Burney: It’s the same thing. Delete is backspace on the Mac.

Adriana Linares: Yes, but then there’s function backspace which is the forward delete.

Brett Burney: There is a function key. Exactly. And that’s the forward delete. So you’re exactly right. I mean so it’s little things like that because on most keyboards, well, the keyboards would like a number pad. They would have a separate delete button, right. And so, in other words, but it’s little tiny things like that that I know can get people a little frustrated if they’re not —

Adriana Linares: Just Google it.

Brett Burney: Exactly. And in a similar way as you know, on the Windows side, we have Control key. Well we actually have a Control key on the Mac side as well.

Adriana Linares: And a Command key.

Brett Burney: But on a Mac we have a Command key that usually operates like the Control key on a window side. For example, like on Windows, if I want to copy and paste with the keyboard, shortcut is Control C, Control V. Well on the Mac side, the keyboard shortcut is Command C, Command V little things like that.

Adriana Linares: And they put them right next to each other, which is not annoying at all.

Brett Burney: They do.

Adriana Linares: So you just have to get used to it.

Brett Burney: And then it’s just it’s things like on the Windows side we have the taskbar, I think that’s what they still call it in Windows 11, right, you have the taskbar at the bottom and we have a dock on the Mac side. We have menus but instead of each application on the Windows side having their own menu bar, we have a menu bar at the very top of the screen on a Mac that stays a menu bar, no matter what application that you’re in.

Again it’s very, very similar it’s not that difficult but it does take some getting used to and when time is money and our profession sometimes I tell people you’re going to have to give yourself a little bit of grace period there to make sure a couple of days, a few weeks, I promise you you’ll get familiar with it, your muscle memory will kick in but you have to put that into the equation.

Adriana Linares: Do they still offer at the Mac stores an appointment like you get a free hour of training with an expert because when people come to me, I say go to your Mac store, buy the one you want and for God’s sake, take one hour to save you hours of frustration later and sit with, I call them all geniuses that works in there, that work in there, sit with a genius, have them show you those basics because it will really, really help.

I can’t tell you guys how many times I still today right now, like yesterday had a call with a Mac user who didn’t think they could right click. I am like it’s a two tap, two tap.

Brett Burney: Two taps.

Adriana Linares: Right click, right there.

Brett Burney: And sometimes you have to go into settings and change it. I’ve been known to just kind of hang around the Apple store and it’s like, there’s so many people is there that you see, we’re just so friendly and being able to talk about it, I see people try to do something and I’m like you can do that. And they’re like, wow, thank you. But there’s other people that are in there.

Jeff, I know you do the same thing, it’s like, it’s just fun to go in there and kind of interact with this. And so, that’s another aspect of the Apple store but you’re absolutely right Adriana, not only do they have classes on like getting started Mac 101 but it’s like even things like how to take better photos with your iPhone.

I used to take my kids to coding classes that they had there and they’re all free and they’re all there where you can ask questions of not only the Apple geniuses that work there, they’re not really formally call that anymore but we still call them that. But there’s other people, other customers that people just like hanging around and being able to help each other out and answer questions too.

(00:55:04)

Adriana Linares: Jeff, what can you add to this part of the conversation?

Jeff Richardson: Well, first of all, I’m going to add that you’re right that they technically don’t call them Apple geniuses anymore Brett but I just saw an article that in Tysons Corner, Virginia, which was the very first Apple store to open up a very long time ago, they’ve redesigned and they opened a larger store and they actually have a section there called the Genius Bar.

Adriana Linares: I love it.

Brett Burney: Yay.

Jeff Richardson: I don’t know if they’re doing that for nostalgia reasons for that particular story because of its history or if Apple is once again turning it around. But other than that, I mean Brett was sort of talking about some of the differences between Mac and Windows. We can start to talk about some of the software things too that you want to do if you want to talk about that Adriana.

It’s some ways it’s easy for attorneys because for most folks, if your practice is like mine, you’re writing and you’re creating documents, which means you need Microsoft Word, and you need PDF files and there’s lots of other things you can do but that’s the core of it. And the nice part is that Microsoft has been a part of the Mac since 1984, a very, very, very long time. And although there have been times in past decades when Microsoft products on the Mac works different from Windows, there were some dark days in the 90s to be sure.

We are way past that today and nowadays you can use Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft 365, the newest branding of it, you can use Word and Excel and all those other things, but most importantly Word on the Mac just as easily as you can as the PC, the ribbon is they are just like on the PC, it all just works and the software is just there.

And so just like on a Windows computer, you’re going to subscribe to Windows 365, you’re going to do the same thing on a Mac and you’re going to have it. On the Mac, when it comes to working with PDF files, the Mac inherently has, I think, always worked better with PDF files than the PC, and there’s some historical reasons for that. I mean, if you go way, way back when to the 1980s, Apples were better with desktop publishing and are the forefront of some of this Adobe technology.

But nowadays it’s always been super simple just from any print dialog box to choose to print a PDF file and I know that Windows offers many of that now too, but it’s always worked incredibly well in the Mac. And of course, if you want to get third party products to do more superstar things in terms of compiling PDFs and putting things together, you can either do that using the built-in free software in a Mac, which is called Preview, or if you want more power features you can use Adobe Acrobat products.

But I mean that’s the core of what you want. And frankly, if you have Adobe Acrobat and if you have Microsoft Office 365, you are 95% of the way there, add on to it whatever web-based resources you’re going to use for time and billing, for document management, for e-discovery, for those sorts of things. And I mean that’s basically you’re packaged.

I’m not going to tell you that individual attorneys won’t have other specific products that they use and one of the fantastic things about the app, about the Mac is that there’s all of these third-party extensions. I mean, we could talk forever about things like 1Password for storing your passwords, which of course is on both PC and Mac and things like TextExpander, that you can make it that you type a few letters and it expands into something longer. And all of those are fantastic add-ons which exist to certain degree on Windows but I think tend to work better on the Mac.

But for the core, you’re getting your practice up on a computer, that’s what you need.

Adriana Linares: So I wanted to say two quick things that you made me think of and that is once you subscribe to Microsoft 365 Business as we all know we are proponent of, please do not buy home. When you go to office.com, let’s say, you’re going to be by text or you’re going to have your Windows machine. You’re going to have your new Mac next to each other. When you go to office.com and hit that Home button, the bottom on the top right hand corner, it’s going to say install Office.

If you are on your Mac, it’s going to install those products for the Mac because it’s going to detect that you’re on a Mac. And then if you’re on Windows, it’s going to detect that you’re on Windows. So, Microsoft 365 is a must-have and no, you don’t have to buy a different subscription, you don’t need to add on, you get five installs with every subscription to Microsoft 365. So it makes it really easy.

And Jeff, I wanted you to talk a little bit more about Preview if you don’t mind. Preview is the built-in app with Mac that helps you really do some amazing things with PDFs, does it, I’m just going to run down them real quick and you just fill in, give us a little background but does it OCR? Can you edit a PDF? Can you sign a PDF? Can you convert a PDF to Word using Preview?

Jeff Richardson: Although Preview does not offer OCR capabilities, I think it does everything else you just ticked off. You can edit it, you can highlight things, you can annotate on things, you can bring up a little toolbar on the side that has each little page like a thumbnail and so if you want to move around pages or add something in, you can do all of those features just fine with Preview.

Again, the only big feature that it doesn’t do is the OCR and even that, I mean, again, I’m not – not that I have any insight into what Apple is doing in the future, but I will tell you that on the iPhone and iPad, Apple now has built-in ability that if I take a picture of something that has text in it with my iPhone, it will immediately see the text and give you the opportunity to copy and paste.

(01:00:07)

It’s a very powerful engine and you don’t have to be that much of a fortune teller to say that if Apple has this fantastic technology on the iPhone and the iPad, it’s just a matter of time before they’re going to bring it to the Mac and Preview is going to have built-in OCR in there. So, it would not surprise me for this to come out soon again.

Again, don’t get me wrong. There are times when you want to have something more robust, whether it be from Adobe or some of the other third parties that have more specialized PDF programs, in terms of things like Bates numbering and these sorts of things, of course, you’re going to want the more advanced.

But when it comes to the simple stuff that you want to do for manipulating PDF, which is a core part of my law practice is doing that every day. Preview is often the simple tool that will do what you need.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, so I encourage everyone if you are a Mac user, if you haven’t really explored and figured out what Preview can do, either go get an appointment with one of those geniuses or watch a YouTube video. It’s a very helpful tool for you to know about. What else do we need to know about software?

We talked about iPassword and TextExpander, I talk about those all the time. I love them. Can you talk about a paste app because I feel like, for me, the clipboard and windows is just everything in my life and so I had to get a third-party tool because that’s not baked into the operating system for Macs.

Brett Burney: I’m going to quickly just reiterate that you guys have already talked about. People come to me and say, well, I got a Mac and hey guess what Apple has their own Office software on the Mac. So I don’t have to go Microsoft Office and it’s true. Apple has Pages, which is like Word and they have Keynote, which is like PowerPoint and they have Numbers, which is like Excel.

But those are not what I would consider to be professional grade at least for the legal profession.

Adriana Linares: Thank you for saying this.

Brett Burney: Yeah, absolutely. And so that’s the first professional purchase that I tell people after you get your Mac computer, you’re going to get an Office 365 subscription for exactly what you were describing Adriana because if you have a still a Windows computer, you have an iPhone, you have an Android, you have an iPad, guess what, you get to install and access your Word documents on all of those.

Number two, exactly what you guys were talking about, get a subscription probably to Acrobat DC, right, the professional version especially if you are utilizing PDFs all the time in your practice and most of us are.

Adriana Linares: $15 a month people.

Brett Burney: Exactly. And here’s the thing, Adriana, that’s not — Adobe is not my default PDF viewer on my Mac. For everything you guys were just talking about, my default PDF viewer is Preview. Number one because it is built into the operating system, it’s free and it opens lightning fast, but that’s just for viewing the PDF. Does that make sense?

Adriana Linares: Yes.

Brett Burney: So if I want to actually do some of the redactions or annotations like you guys were talking about, then I will usually right click on that PDF and say, open in Adobe Acrobat, or something along those lines. So and I just use that because it is a little bit more overhead and I don’t need all of that all the time but that just gives I still say those are the two big profession grade software purchases you need to make; Office 365 and Adobe, I think they call it still Acrobat DC, right the Document Cloud is what they called it and you get all of those in there.

After that exactly what Jeff was talking about. After that, it’s whatever is going to work the best for you. For example, obviously 1Password, TextExpander just like Jeff mentioned.

Adriana Linares: Hold on Brett Burney, you’re not going to just throw out TextExpander out there without talking about your freaking awesome course that I tell everyone about.

Brett Burney: I like TextExpander, yeah.

Adriana Linares: If you are going to get TextExpander, which I am telling you right now attorneys if you haven’t got this yet, please do not slowly tap your way to textexpander.com, use your fastest typing fingers. Go to textexpander.com and download this incredibly valuable tool, and then our friend Brett Burney has made an online course that I suggest to everyone on TextExpander for Lawyers and you, Brett, you believe in this product so much and use it so much that you actually took the time to help teach other lawyers how to use it.

So, in just 30 seconds, tell us real quick about textexpanderforlawyers.com and what we will learn over there?

Brett Burney: Yeah, it’s great. Jeff already talked about it and actually the Mac now has a built-in keyboard replacement or text replacement. So like for example, when I want to type the word text expander that’s a lot of typing, right, I don’t want to type that every single time.

Adriana Linares: It is. Adriana Linares is a lot of typing.

Brett Burney: Exactly. It’s a beautiful name, but if you don’t want to type it all the time, you could just have like ADL, maybe not, because maybe ADL would be somewhere that you would find in, for example, from my name, I do, mine is Brett Burney, so I do BBB, that’s my shortcut. When I hit BBB –

Adriana Linares: You will never BBB anywhere else.

Brett Burney: I will never three Bs in a row on anything else so when I type three Bs, it automatically expands to my first and last name, I don’t have to sit there but that’s just the start of it. My email address, you know, I will fat-finger my email address so often and it gets it wrong and I hate to have to take the time or even the date, like the current day, I have to stop what I’m doing and look at my calendar, what day is it.

Adriana Linares: What is the keyboard shortcut for the day on a TextExpander?

(01:05:00)

Brett Burney: Whatever you want it to be?

Adriana Linares: Oh you make it? Okay.

Brett Burney: Absolutely. My is DDT because I don’t ever use that, it sounds silly, but people would use like ;DA or whatever is going to work for you that you just — it becomes muscle memory. So it just automatically types out that date whether I want year, year, year, month, month and day, day or do I want June 27, 2003 like however, you want the date to be you can set additional expansions on there.

So obviously, yes, I love the platform. It saves me hours every month of typing time that I would normally do. And, I know, Jeff uses it too.

Jeff Richardson: And Adriana, we have a hostile witness here because he did not answer your question.

Adriana Linares: He did not. Thank you counsel.

Jeff Richardson: Your question was about his course and instead he gave you a preview of the course, with some of the things that he describes and I’m giving — I’m ripping Brett only because I actually took his course as well and it was — even if someone who uses TextExpander a lot, Brett had some fantastic tips in there and I would encourage, if anyone’s looking to be more productive with a Mac or a PC because I use TextExpander on my PC at my office just as much as I use it at home, my personal date shortcut, by the way is Ddate.

So if I type that it puts the date and for me, the way that I use my shortcut is it puts the date in the format of the year-the month in numbers-the day. And I use that shortcut in the beginning of all of my file names.

Adriana Linares: Sure.

Brett Burney: Exactly.

Jeff Richardson: So that therefore whenever I sort my files by name by definition, its sorting them by date because as we all know, just because I add a file today, doesn’t mean the file was actually from that day. It may have been from two months ago and I want to be able to sort them but that’s just one of a million examples.

So again you should people even though Brett won’t tell us about it, you should encourage folks to use his course because it’s very useful and I love taking it. But it also I do agree with you Brett that TextExpander is great.

Adriana Linares: Guys and gals, TextExpander does a lot more than just little snippets. If you have a certificate of Surface that you use all the time a signature block for two signers and then the next contract you have has three signors and maybe you have a signature plot for executor and executee, anything that you type over and over again or that you have to go to other documents to find a paste into your new document, TextExpander is really, really powerful.

Can you tell me what Setapp is?

Brett Burney: Yes. So actually answering to the question that you had in the Paste app.

Adriana Linares: My hostile witness has become –

Brett Burney: So Setapp is — there were several software developers mostly for the Mac got together and they said, let’s do a subscription level, but instead of just like one or two apps we will give people the ability to download from dozens of apps like whatever is going to be most helpful. And so even if you use one or two of these apps, it’s definitely pays for itself, I think is $10 a month is what it is.

I stopped it and stayed away from it for many months thinking well, I don’t want to pay that, but I got to tell you now that I am, I am so thrilled because I can down — if I think of something that oh I need a little tiny utility just to download this YouTube video. Guess what Setapp has it.

They also provide one — they actually have Default Folder X, another little fantastic file management app that I use all the time. They have one called Bartender which basically just organizes your little items in the menu bar in the top right of the Mac because a lot of times I got a bunch of stuff up there and it also has this paste app that I love, it’s just simply called Paste app and I love this because this is basically like a clipboard history, right. It keeps a history of everything that I’ve copied to my clipboard.

There’s other apps that will do this but I find this one, I love the best because not only can I go into the history and find something that I copied even yesterday or two minutes ago, or whatever the case may be, but I can choose to simply just — I got a keyboard shortcut that I can bring it up and then I can paste plain text.

So I use this all the time Adriana. If I copy text from the PDF or if I copy text from a web browser where they’ve got all kinds of weird formatting, I don’t want the formatting, I just want the text. So I’ll go and copy it and then I use this little Paste app and it’s all now muscle memory with keyboard shortcuts. Then I just boom, boom, boom and I’ve got it pasted in there just with the text without any formatting or all the crazy stuff, with line breaks or anything else. I used this constantly throughout the day when I’m copying and pasting back and forth.

Adriana Linares: Very, very critical productivity app is having a Paste app.

Jeff Richardson: One more thing I’ll say about the set app that’s the one that you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a whole bunch of little apps. The folks that are behind Setapp ate the MacPaw Company, which is actually based in Ukraine in Kiev. And so, if you know not to be political in our podcast today but if you want to support some really smart and nice computer programmers that are going through stuff that I can’t even imagine in their home country of Ukraine that’s where they’re based and that company every time I hear from the people there, they’re just fantastic folks. So you know that you’re working with a good company.

(01:09:58)

Adriana Linares: And I want to make sure we are hearing what you’re saying so it’s S-E-T-A-P-P.com, Setapp.

Jeff Richardson: Correct, you got it, that’s it.

Adriana Linares: I might get this, does anybody have a referral code for me?

Brett Burney: We will have to generate one for you. There’s a lot of great stuff on it. You can just go to the website and you can look around there.

Adriana Linares: And this is Mac only?

Brett Burney: Correct, these are all Mac specific software.

Jeff Richardson: Correct.

Brett Burney: Some of them will work on the iPhone, iPad if they have an iOS but like there’s Ulysses, which is a fantastic little note taking app. I’ve already mentioned the Bartender that’s in there. There’s like little tiny things for things like CleanShot X is another really nifty screenshotter that you can do. I like using Snagit a lot but then myNode is an excellent mind mapping.

I mean just go to the website, you can look through all of it. You can try it for a few days on a trial perspective. And, you know, the great thing about it is that if you don’t like it, you can stop using it. But I guarantee you, you’ll find enough of the software in there that it’ll pay for itself and then you’re just supporting the development of those apps over and over as well.

Adriana Linares: You know, I just thought of something that we hadn’t talked about some and it’s sort of swinging that direction. But it has to do with this. So I was just thinking, okay, great so I’m going to pay $10 a month, I get dozens of subscriptions and chances are these are tried-and-true programs. I don’t have to worry about them.

Brett Burney: Yes.

Adriana Linares: Putting a virus on my Mac. So talk to me real quick just about the situation with Macs and viruses, which they do get viruses.

Brett Burney: Yes.

Adriana Linares: Ask me how I know. So should I run an anti-virus on my Mac or should I just be careful?

Brett Burney: I don’t know what Jeff is going to answer, but I would say, no, it’s not necessary to run antivirus on your Mac.

Adriana Linares: And please don’t actually.

Brett Burney: Yeah you could but so here’s the way that I approach a lot of this because you’re absolutely right Adriana. It it’s not that Macs never get viruses or there’s never any malware, but at least so far for the majority of the Mac’s life, it’s mostly been security by obscurity, right in the sense that if you were a bad person and you wanted to write some software to affect the most number of people as possible, would you write malware for the Mac operating system or for Windows?

You’re probably going to go Windows, right. You’re going to put your efforts into that. Now, that doesn’t mean that there are exploits and there are like a lot of security hacks. The difference is and Jeff can talk a lot about this as well is that Apple has such a huge focus on the security component of there and so again, if there’s something that they want to patch, if there’s a security patch or something that they need to fix, they will do that usually in a . or .O type of an upgrade throughout.

There’s just a lot of things on the Mac that that don’t allow for what we typically have seen from a ransomware perspective or from a virus perspective that would affect a lot of stuff, it just, it doesn’t happen in the way on the Mac. Some of that again, it’s just by design, the way that the Mac and the operating system is designed but Apple also because again, they control both the software and the hardware, a lot of that can be avoided a lot of times too.

Jeff Richardson: Yeah, a few years ago, my wife encountered something on her Mac where because of some pop-up ad on some website or something like that it had taken over her browser and maybe that I kept pop-up windows. It was a real pain and it took us a while to get it off. And so that just shows you that Macs can be infected.

Having said that, if you use a PC and you don’t use virus software, I think you’re committing malpractice. But if you’re using a Mac, I would say just the opposite. I actually do not — I think that the — it’s going to end up slowing down your computer unnecessarily and getting in the way, you really don’t need a virus software. There are a couple of things here and there like websites you can get access to that you may have to work around but you can work around those should they come.

I don’t think — I would not encourage you to install virus or other types of malware protection software on a Mac unlike with a strong emphasis the PC where you absolutely positively need it.

Adriana Linares: And I agree with you. It’s funny, I had, my brother had a virus on his Mac and it was the same kind of as browser-based. And it took me a while to figure out how to get it off. But I got it off of there and everyone, for those of you with PC users, that are PC users, don’t forget Windows comes with Windows Defender and so lot of security anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spam, if you’re running Microsoft 365. So you’re typically okay and I do not encourage you to go buy McAfee or Norton for your PC.

I encourage you to have the latest version of Windows, make sure it’s updated and always running Windows Defender.

You guys, the last thing I want to ask you about because I know this has been a long show and I really appreciate it but and it’s a little bit of a flashback to hardware, what about printers and scanners. Can I buy any printer and any scanner now and any other camera or do I have to buy Mac specific peripherals?

Jeff Richardson: I mean you do need to buy stuff that says that it works with the Mac because there are still driver issues just like the old days. And so if you’re buying, whether it’s a laser printer or any jet printer or whatever you’re going to want to make sure that it says works with the Mac on the box.

(01:15:01)

Most of them are going to. So it’s not going to be a big deal to find that. Now cameras and stuff, that’s not really an issue because if it’s a nicer DSLR camera, you’re going to have some sort of an SD card or one of those types of things. And, of course, for most people, the best camera that they have is the iPhone and the iPhone again is going to work much more seamless with the Mac than it will with the PC. So that’s something that you need to think about.

Scanners too, scanners is one area where sometimes some scanners will only work with the PC and other scanners will work with the Mac. I will tell you that I often find that the scanner and printers, the software that comes with them for the Mac I often find to be unnecessary because the Mac built-in software handles it just fine and I don’t even bother installing the third-party software whereas on a PC it probably is safer just to go ahead and use the software that they provide you.

Adriana Linares: Okay, well where I want to end is I want to give a couple of our favorite tips. I have one that I can, I only have one that I can think of, although, I did give Function Delete as one of my favorites.

The other one that I love if you’re a Mac User and you haven’t figured out how the spacebar allows you to preview a file, whether it’s on your desktop or you’re in finder, it’s freaking awesome and I wish Windows had that. So Mac users, single click on any file anywhere on your computer and just tap the spacebar, it’s going to open up preview and give you a preview of that file before you commit to opening it.

Brett, do you have any of that?

Brett Burney: That’s such a good one. I love it. That officially it’s called Quick Look on the Mac.

Adriana Linares: Quick Look.

Brett Burney: And I think this is weird because some things and even the one my favorite tip I think has almost been copied now by Windows 10 and 11, I’m not pointing fingers.

Adriana Linares: I will tell you.

Brett Burney: I’m just saying it that today, I know some of it because I think there is a similar like a preview right on the Windows side you can do. But I use that all the time Adriana to where I don’t even use — I don’t even click on a file, I simply just open up the finder, which is what is called in Windows, it’s the File Explorer, right but open up my finder, I’ve got a list of files and I’ll just use my up and down arrow to highlight the file and then my other hand, my left hand usually, I’m hitting the spacebar to just open it.

And once I hit the spacebar and it’s open, I still hit to use the down arrows and it just previews the next file, and next file and next file, it’s just fantastic I love it. In a similar way, one of the things that I like in Mac laptops is the huge Trackpad that you have, number one.

Adriana Linares: Oh yeah.

Brett Burney: Now again, a lot of Windows computers, now we’ll have something similar and I’ve seen this, but I use something that Apple officially calls Mission Control and all that is I’m taking three fingers, and I’m swiping three fingers up on the Trackpad, and what that does is it gives me an entire view of all of my open windows. So I’m doing this multiple times throughout the day. If I wanted to say, oh, you know, I could use Command tab, like, Alt tab on Windows command tab will give me a way to switch to different apps, but I will do Mission Control three-finger swipe up, I see all my windows and oh, there’s my calendar and I click on it and then it comes to the forefront. I love that.

Adriana Linares: Excellent.

Brett Burney: Or in a way and also and I think they call this File Expose A, kind of a weird name, but it’s let’s say that I have got four Microsoft.

Adriana Linares: Not for this show.

Brett Burney: I’ve got four Microsoft Word documents open. I need to switch to the other one, right. Well, instead of three fingers up, I’ll do three fingers down and instead of showing all my open windows, that will only show me the four open Microsoft Word documents.

Adriana Linares: Like an in-app present.

Brett Burney: Exactly. And then I just click into the one that I want.

Adriana Linares: Love it.

Brett Burney: So I’m using that all — that has — I even had to think about like how do I do it because I don’t even know, it’s so muscle memory now. But I’m constantly interacting with my operating system that way and all the windows that I have open, because exactly what you said, I’ve got multiple PDFs and Outlook and Windows and Calendar and Word and everything that’s open and browsers all the time and multiple tabs so that’s a good way that I do it.

Adriana Linares: Okay. Jeff, you got one for us, that’s a good one. Both of those.

Jeff Richardson: As I mentioned before, one of the things that I love most about the Mac is not just the stuff that you can do inherently with the device, but the way that it works so seamlessly with other Apple devices because the thing is you always should use the best device for the task.

When it comes to motifications, my Apple watch might be the best thing. When it comes to just a quick jotting off a note, my iPhone is best, for some things my iPad is best, for some things, my Mac is best. But it’s nice that you can seamlessly work between them. So Apple has a whole range of technology that they’ve put under the umbrella of continuity. And in fact, I mentioned one part of it before that you can take a mouse on the Mac and move it over to an iPad.

Adriana Linares: That’s cool.

Jeff Richardson: But one super simple thing that you don’t need to do anything, it’s turned on by default. It’s called Universal Clipboard and what it means is that if I am using a Mac and I see something like a website or something, I’m like, oh yeah, I’m going to want to look at this later on my iPad when I’m sitting on my couch. You can just copy the address or copy the text or copy anything on a Mac, copy of picture, copy anything and then if you then immediately turned your iPad.

(01:20:00)

And if your iPad is within a few feet of your computer, if it’s sitting there at the desk with you, you can just paste and it knows that the last thing that you copied was from the Mac and it pastes it on the iPad and of course it works in reverse too. You can copy from the iPad or the iPhone and paste on the Mac, and it’s just one of those examples of something that just works.

And even though I’ve been doing it for a long time, I still sometimes feel like it’s magic. It’s like, how do you know that that’s and, of course, we know how it works. And it seems simple, but it’s just so useful and it’s so efficient, and boy I miss that on my PC.

Adriana Linares: Yeah.

Brett Burney: This is so fun. Let’s just have a whole show on Mac tips, Adriana. This is good.

Adriana Linares: Oh my God, we should. Okay, well, I don’t want to take away from your podcast switch, I was just about to say everyone, please make sure you go visit Jeff’s blog, is it the iPhone J.D. Jeff or just iphonejd.com.

Jeff Richardson: Just iphonejd.com and for the podcast it’s just inthenewspodcast.com.

Adriana Linares: And then Brett, you’ve got some great resources online too.

Brett Burney: Yeah. I would say though today I mean I feel like the Mac lawyer movement, there are still Mac lawyers that are out there but I feel like it had a little bit more of a heyday back in the day because we had like Ben Stevens I mentioned, I don’t think his blog is active anymore. I actually had a blog macsinlaw.com and I haven’t updated that in a couple of years unfortunately.

Adriana Linares: So Jeff you are it, you are everything.

Brett Burney: I know. And so I tell people the iPhone J.D. because even though it’s iPhone, don’t get sideswiped by that. Jeff and I talk about all kinds of technology. Just another one quickly, I would say David Sparks, who’s a good friend of all of ours, he’s an attorney or used to be a full attorney out in California. He has now made sort of the full move to like an Apple thought leader out there.

But he still has fantastic stuff that he puts on his blog called MacSparky.

Adriana Linares: MacSparky.com.

Brett Burney: MacSparky.com. And Jeff is even a member of his like, he’s got his little club that he has.

Adriana Linares: Like a mastermind group.

Brett Burney: Right. But it’s a great way to get involved and David is always so kind. He will answer questions about like how to practice when he was a lawyer. And then the last thing quickly I would just say there has been a Google group that has been around for many, many years called Macs In Law Offices and we call it MILO for sure.

Macs In Law Offices, now it’s a Google Group, you got to Google for it. It’s like groups.google/groups/milogroup. So you’ll find it once you Google around for it, but you’re welcome to join that. If you’re a Mac there’s no requirement to get or cost at all, you can just join that.

And there’s a few folks that stay active in posting questions and there’s some folks that are active about answering questions and there’s just a whole lot of lurkers out there, they just kind of follow along but that’s another good resource if you are a Mac user. That’s one that’s still active today.

Adriana Linares: That’s awesome. You guys, I feel like we could do this like you do well, actually you do this on your podcast all the time but I very, very much appreciate your time. I know it’s the middle of the workday for everyone, but thank you so much for coming on New Solo. And with my special Mac issue, I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time.

You can reach out to Jeff at iphonejd.com. Brett can always be reached through burneyconsultants.com and I just want to say thank you so very much. This was a lot of fun. I wish we had more time.

Brett, you need to come to New Orleans so we can all have a face-to-face nerd out. We can out Ernie around, Crain Ball is here in town, we got a whole bunch of us live in here.

Brett Burney: We will have a Mac Mardi Gras, it will be great, I can’t wait.

Adriana Linares: All right everyone, thanks so much for listening. I know this was a long episode but I hope it was helpful for those of you in the Mac world or thinking about Mac and of course we have listed some great resources for you. I look forward to our next episode. And if you enjoyed what you’ve heard, please give us a 5-star rating on Apple podcast and of course, share this episode with any of the other Mac loving lawyers.

[Music]

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