Apple in the Office

Chuck Newton, who runs the Third Wave Lawyer, recently had a post on his thoughts about the Macbook Air and further on about the value proposition of using Apple products or Macs in the Law Office.

Chuck makes the usual commonly misguided points about Macs, which makes even the reluctant-fanboy in me feel the need to respond. So, let’s take these one at a time:

Chuck says:

I am all about cheap and I hate cell phone bills coming in in the hundreds of dollars a month. That is also the reason I have been unimpressed with the MacBook Air. I am not into novelty and design as an excuse to take money out of my pocket. That ended with me when I bought a Pet Rock in the 70s. Apple is all about being the end thing, and some lawyers like that. It is pretty. It is cool.

Well, I guess that one lawyer’s experience is hardly dispositive of an issue, but let me tell you about the cost of my Apple products (I’m assuming you’re points concern the non-cross-platform items, i.e. not iPods or iPhones). I run a small law firm in New Jersey that has 4 attorneys and 2 staff members. Put aside the issue of whether I need all of these people or the overhead for a second and let me tell you that the entire office uses Mac computers. Here are the ages of the computers we have: 1 laptop (Macbook) from 2006, 2 eMacs (all-in-ones) from 2000 and 3 PowerMac towers from 1998. That’s right - I have 3 computers that have been functioning for 10 years. So, the average money I spent in hardware per year for the last 10 years for those users was $200 per attorney. For the “staff” computers the cost is much lower (maybe $50 per attorney per year). If one is all about cheap, you can’t do better than that.

At the same time, in the last two years, I have spent $0 in IT costs and about 15 minutes in down-time when I thought one of the eMacs was broken and drove to my neighborhood repair dude (who fixed a loose internal connection, charged me nothing, and had me back in the office working in those 15 minutes). So, in running the firm, I have almost no down time and no upkeep costs simply because of the fact that I’m running Apple machines. When I worked for a firm that used Windows, they had a bevy of “loaner” laptops for the folks whose machines needed repair. I needed the loaners anywhere between 2-3 times per month. Imagine what that would have cost if I was running the large firm.

Finally, and I only disclose because I think it’s relevant to the conversation, about $0.50 of every dollar goes to profit. There is no way I could maintain that kind of margin if I were running Windows machines. I don’t have any IT firm on retainer to help me to stay running. The shelf life of my computer hardware is ridiculously off the scale. I finally upgraded some machines because if their inability to run the newest software (which is 4 generations beyond what it was when they were first purchased).

The point is - there is no way I could agree to the position that using Macs in my law office presents a higher cost proposition than Windows.

Chuck also says:

And, these lawyers are willing to burden their practices with the costs of apple products (both as to purchase price and in operating it in this Windows environment in which lawyers must too often compete).

First, as a true fanboy, I’d have to take you to task for not capitalizing the “A” in Apple (you are off Steve Jobs’ Xmas list). But, my second point is that that statement is just wrong. I have a number of clients who have been with the firm longer than 10 years. We’ve never used anything but Mac products. We’ve never needed to have a Windows machine to operate in the Windows environment (which of course I will admit is the case). Between the Mac’s native ability to create, read and comment on .PDFs and the number of free (FREE) office suites that create, read and edit Word and Excel documents - there’s never a translation problem. In fact, clients were surprised to learn that we run a Mac environment precisely because there was never a problem.

Another point that should be made is that running Macs allows me to better compete with other lawyers because of the superior way in which they allow me to be creative. A few concrete examples - my proposals, presentations and work product is better on an order of magnitude as compared to my fellow Windows-using colleagues. Part of that can be done with software that comes right with the computer (and should be deducted from any comparison on price) and other costs as much as $29. Now, others can say that all of that flourish is unnecessary, but I would argue it’s what contributes to the thought that all lawyers are boring (and I don’t mean you, Chuck - anyone who posts as much good jazz as you do can’t be boring - but you get my point). Without shipping it out to trial presentation firms, graphic designers or marketing gurus, I can create all kinds of great brochures, stunning “powerpoint” presentations and even my own letterhead at no or little costs. Plus, I have fun doing it. The hardware and software allow me to work (serve as tools) and I don’t have to spend any time learning how to use the tools - there’s inherent value in that. As an example, if the difference between a micro-notebook running Windows versus Mac OSX natively is truly $1,400 as suggested (and I would take issue with that), and you spend more than 10 hours tinkering with stuff that you don’t want to be tinkering with - haven’t you made that money already?

Actually, let me address the cost difference comparison being suggested. To say that a sub-notebook running Windows (and I’m familiar with most of them) is comparable to the MacBook Air is to purposely discount or ignore any of the advantages of the Air. For instance, most of the Windows machines compromised by reducing the size of the keyboard and screen size (and quality). For people who think that pecking things out with their thumbs is frustrating, try typing on a slightly-smaller-than-usual keyboard where nothing is where your muscle memory is telling you it is. The Air, on the other hand, has a full-sized keyboard, and as a writing machine - that’s crucial for me. The other thing about screen size and quality I can see if people don’t want to pay more for that. I would suggest that a screen that uses LED and saves battery life is preferable to one that doesn’t (forget about the environmental advantages - just focus on spending more time working, less money on batteries) and that’s worth something to me.

Finally, there’s no way that I would recommend an Air to a new-convert as their sole working machine (and here I open myself up to a price counter), but the Air is really more of a second machine. What you want (and I know you want one, Chuck) is a Macbook. It’s an excellent laptop, only about 5 lbs., and powerful enough to run your entire office. In fact, until last week, it served as my only computer for the last 2 years. It’s never been down, it’s never given me the blue screen of death and I don’t have to spend my precious time tinkering with how to get it to work “right.”

So, if you give me enough time and enough of your ear, I promise I can convince you to switch. In fact, it’s almost sacrilege that a cost-sensitive, solo-practitioner who’s at the bleeding edge of how to be a lawyer is using anything but a Mac. In fact, you should listen to our podcast (which I recorded, produced and published for free from my Macbook) to hear some other, more notable, folks tell you the same thing….you do have an iPod, right? Here’s the link.

See - I even managed to avoid being a reactionist-jerk in my response. That’s better than average for challenging a Mac-fanboy to a duel.

Posted by Victor J. Medina,
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

Well, I’ve heard you and it’s quite clear that everyone wants to download the inaugural MILO Chat podcast.

Bear with me as I learn how to include all the shiny buttons that make downloading to iTunes a one-button procedure. I’m also figuring out how to create an RSS feed that will allow you to subscribe to this podcast and get regular updates as you would for any podcasts produced by the “professionals.” It shouldn’t be difficult, which just proves to you how wholly inadequate I am for the task.

Until I’ve shaken out all the cobwebs, here is a link to a downloadable version of the MILO Chat podcast. Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, the link below should provide a right-click or control-click option to download the podcast as a saved file onto your desktop or directly into iTunes.

Keep on the lookout for major changes — if this becomes popular enough, the four of us, including the monkey, may just have to find a new home for our little show.

Download the podcast here

And, let us know what you think….

No pithy title. No lazy link love to another review. Just a straight up review of the software that most likely saved my career.

I have had a problem with my hands for quite some time. As a lawyer, I do a fair amount of typing, whether that’s for e-mail responses or in drafting letters and agreements. At the same time, I spent a number of years playing the piano recreationally. All of this has resulted in me having a dull pain in my hands whenever I type too much after a long day.

Before I switched to Macs, I ran a speech recognition software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It was pretty good, but the law firm that I worked for got me the “legal” edition of the software, which I think was a few versions behind the really good software. After I switched to Macs, the only piece of software that was out there for speech recognition was iListen by MacSpeech. To be frank, it wasn’t very good. In fact, with all due respect to MacSpeech, it was terrible. So, for the last two years, I have been writing things out longhand, typing everything, and generally living with the dull pain that resulted.

As many people who are interested in speech recognition software know, MacSpeech announced that they were launching a new speech recognition software called Dictate. This was really important news because rather than relying on the old Phillips engine that powered iListen, MacSpeech had been able to license the engine that powered Dragon from Nuance, and that was what was going to be running the new Dictate software. They made this announcement at MacWorld, even winning a Best of Show award for Dictate. I was very excited and placed my order right away.

Then, I spent the next month and a half checking the status of my order two or three times a day. Finally, last night, I learned that my copy of Dictate was shipping out and would arrive today. I installed it right away and have been playing with it for the last three hours. As you might have guessed, I’ve been drafting this entire review using Dictate.

What can I say? It’s fabulous. I mean, I only did the basic training, and I’d be surprised if the software got one word wrong for every thousand that I’ve spoken. I’ve used it so much that my keyboard, which is attached via Bluetooth, has power down and lost connection with my Macbook. If it does miss a word, it is most likely because I’ve gotten lazy with my dictation not because it has misinterpreted the context or word I’ve spoken.

It takes contractions with ease, and laughs at my challenge to interpret capitalized words like iListen, iPhone, iPod, Dictate, Mac ad nauseam. It even does an excellent job of controlling my computer, such as opening and quitting applications, inserting text before and after other text, and switching between applications.

If I’m being fair with this review, and I’d like to think that I am, I should point out that the software has a couple of bugs. These have less to do with the speech recognition part of the software, and more to do with some of the internal functionality of the commands that you can use to make your speech recognition smoother. Specifically, it has a quirky little bug that copies text after an insertion point somewhere higher in the document and places it at the end of wherever you resume dictating. Not being a programmer, I have no idea why this happens. Also, as many other people have pointed out in their preview of Dictate, the program does not allow you to correct a word by selecting it and choosing from a number of options. Though the company has been very clear that it intends on adding that particular feature in a subsequent version.

Why is this important for you? Well, I’m not sure that it is. But, this is ridiculously important for me because it means I can now rest my hands for the better part of the working day. And, I honestly believe that this software has extended my career by at least a few years. Unfortunately, it also means that I have no excuse for being more productive during the day.

Of course, if you use the program long enough, you will be speaking your punctuation in everyday life. And, that’s going to get annoying for your family very very quickly.

Posted by Victor J. Medina,
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

I’m sure these stories are a dime a dozen. And, I won’t go so far as to suggest that other stores don’t do the same thing, but damn, does Apple do things right.

About 18 days ago, I bought an iPhone (capitalizing that correctly is a real pain). It was pretty nice and I’ve been happy with it. Fast-forward 17 days to when Apple announces the 16GB model for a mere $100 more. I’d have to pay the 10% open-box fee, but it was still a good deal at about 25% more money for 50% more space.

Now, the stated return policy for Apple products is 14 days. Thankfully, I’m one of those people that keep the box with all of the cellophane - so, I wrapped up my iPhone and prepared to argue with the manager to allow me to return my iPhone and purchase the bigger one, even though I was outside the 14-day time frame. I printed out my original receipt. I even printed out the receipt for the nearly $5k I spent in the last 30 days upgrading the firm’s computers.

Now, I was up in Connecticut for family reasons and on my way home to New Jersey. There were no less than 3 Apple stores right off the highway on my ride home. I was determined to stop into every one of them until I had convinced a manager to return and buy. Imagine! I was prepared to argue for the mere privilege of dropping another c-note with them.

The first Apple store I walked into was in West Nyack, NY at the Palisades Mall. The manager’s name was Travis. I spoke with Travis and started out by saying, “Listen, I bought this iPhone about 2 weeks ago and…”

Travis interrupted me, “And you want the 16 GB, right?”

I replied, “Travis, I need the 16 GB”

He said, “Okay - no problem.”

“Wait!” I said. “I have a whole story to tell you and print outs about how much I spend with Apple.”

Travis humored me and said, “Well, you can tell me your story if you want, but I’m still going to give you the 16-gig phone.”

An hour later, I had my 16GB iPhone, had synced it with my computer and loaded all of my content on there and was back in the car for the rest of the ride. The phone worked (spoke with the wife), the podcasts were loaded, music was pumping - what can I say?

Apple rocks - and gives me every excuse to keep spending money with them, despite how I test them….

Posted by Victor J. Medina -
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

I”ve been trying out different software programs that implement the GTD (Getting Things Done) method of productivity. I started out using OmniOutliner with an overlay script called KinklessGTD. The problem was ubiquitous capture and processing. It was an admittedly flawed system, but the best one available. Like a fat man trying diets, I’ve tried every GTD solution out there. Some of them were so horrible that I deleted them after 10 minutes of playing around. Others showed promise, so I was forced to keep dual systems going (I never gave up on OmniOutliner). All the while, the folks at OmniGroup had said that they were working on a dedicated productivity and task management software. I got on their alpha/beta list and have been trying it for months. It’s finally ready for release and so I encourage you to pick up OmniFocus.

Right now this is a Mac-only software program, but if you’re among the enlightened, you’re already running on Apple. Here are the reasons I love OmniFocus. First is that it has been developed by a team of GTD devotees who “get” what implementing the system is about. Simply put, GTD (or any productivity method, for that matter) is essentially about three things: (1) Capture, (2) Processing, and (3) Action. If you accept, as I do, that humans are extremely good at stepping up to a widget machine and cranking out widgets, the most effective thing you can do to increase productivity is spend as much time as is practical at one machine cranking widgets before moving on to the next machine. Translating this to work stuff, place all your calls when you’re best suited to do so and read/respond to emails when you’re on the computer.

Anyways, I digress. OmniFocus allows you to do ubiquitous capture anytime you’re on the computer. You just hit a keystroke combination and BAM! you’re inputting stuff into the program. You don’t have to process it right away, just capture it when it comes and move on to your next task. OmniFocus also collect all the stuff you capture in a single inbox and is very user-friendly at Processing that into its contextually-sensitive parts. Finally, OmniFocus plays nice with iCal, Mail.app and other software to allow you to Act on the tasks when you’re in the right setting to do so.

I highly recommend OmniFocus and if you purchase it before January 8th, you’ll get it at a serious discount. I’ve go no horse in the race, no connection to OmniGroup, but if you’re someone looking for productivity software - OmniFocus is tops.

VJM

As some of you know, I’ve been lusting after the iPhone for some time. Part of the reason I haven’t pulled the trigger on it has been the cost of canceling my Verizon contract early. My parole is not until 6/7/08 - it’s been hard time.

Another reason I’ve been hesitant has been because my whole family is on Verizon. Understand, I’m talking about over 40 of my closest friends and family members are all on Verizon. While I only use about 200 of my 450 allotted daytime minutes, I take advantage of the free In-Network calling to the tune of 700+ minutes. My wife is a worse culprit, using over 1400 minutes per month on In-Network calls.

As further background, my cellphone is primarily used to speak with my wife (on the aforementioned In-Network). I sport a Treo 700p, and I use the “smartphone” parts of that device to surf in the Internet (let’s call that research), check and send email, run my GPS software, and trigger calendar events/to-do lists.

After some investigation, I discovered that I could convert the plans that my wife and I are on to a 700 minute family plan under Verizon for about $60/month less than I’m currently paying. Of course, this means that I’m dropping the data service for the Treo.

For those of you familiar with the iPhone numbers, this means that I can use the $60/month savings on the AT&T plan for the iPhone and get an additional 450 minutes/month and unlimited data. My wife and I are not big text messagers (is that even a word - probably, these days), so I’m not concerned with the 200 text message limit.

I chalk up the cost of the phone as the price of upgrading my hardware (the Treo is getting long in the antenna), plus I’ll get the benefit of getting a video iPod and a certified conversation piece.

So, you might be thinking, “Yay! iPhone!” - but I’m waiting until January to make the final decision. You see, Macworld is coming up and Steve Jobs is sure to take the stage to show me where my hard-earned money is going in the next year. This time last year, Steve introduced the iPhone with a June 2007 launch date. He needed that 6-month lead time, not so much because the device wasn’t ready, but because of FCC regulations.

I’m anticipating a new iPhone announcement in January. If this is going to include introducing a GPS module, 16GB capacity, new Word/Excel editing functions - I’ll probably wait. If it’s just a 3rd-party developer’s kit announcement and 3G, I’ll buy the 8GB model the next day and start enjoying it.

Posted by Victor J. Medina -
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

I’ve been sulking about not having an iPhone and using the excuse that it’s not on a 3G network (which I thought meant it wouldn’t be fast and I wouldn’t be happy with the non-wifi Internet use).

Then I came across this article. I want to believe it, but it’ll take asking a few more questions. Here is a little excerpt for your full RSS-reading pleasure:

* People confuse network bandwidth with latency. Think of latency as how long it takes bits to go from the server to your phone, while bandwidth is how many lanes of highway those bits can use to get there. Because mobile phone networks use narrow-band radio signals, their latency is on average 2 to 10 times that of a wired network. And because of the way the Web HTTP protocol works, the quality of a Web user experience depends much more on low latency than high bandwidth, because Web pages typically contain lots of different elements such as pictures, ads, and widgets coming from many different sources. The result: loading Web pages on a 3G phone may actually take about the same amount of time as a phone loading those pages over an EDGE network because all the network time is spent setting up and tearing down connections, not actually sending big amounts of data. And so far, most carriers have preferred to optimize bandwidth at the expense of latency. Why? Because it’s more marketable (see erroneous analyst quote above).

* High bandwidth radio networks are more error-prone. Because of the sophisticated signaling needed to do high-data rate transmission over narrow-band radios, higher bandwidth networks don’t do as well in real-world radio environments as a lower speed network will. Multi-path interference, doppler frequency changes, and radio noise disrupt high-bandwidth signals more than low. And since phones using TCP connections — the dominant connection type used in Web browsing — have to retransmit data that is corrupted by errors, even an error rate only a few percent higher will dramatically slow down Internet experiences.


* Phone processors and software don’t necessarily keep up with fast data transmission. I noted this phenomenon when I compared my Nokia E61i with the Apple iPhone. Despite the Nokia’s 3G and WiFi network capability, the phone actually felt significantly slower than Apple’s iPhone on the same networks. Why? Because the Nokia processor/OS/software combination was simply slower at moving bits than the iPhone is. The result: even with a 54 megabit WiFi network — a network several times faster than the fastest 3G network — the Internet experience on the Nokia was significantly slower and poorer than that of the iPhone. The phone just couldn’t keep up.


* High bandwidth networks drain batteries. Power consumption of any chip increases according to the frequency. That means if you want your network to go 10 times faster, the chip inside your phone managing that network consumes 10 times the power that a slower chip would (It’s not quite that simple because of different signaling techniques, and in fact there are additional power losses due to frequency that aren’t in the standard dynamic power equation, but the overall principle still holds). This is why Steve Jobs has decried the power consumption of 3G networks — that speedy signaling actually matters in a battery-powered device. So why don’t European users see this power-draining effect today with their phones? Well, check out the Nokia message boards and you’ll find that they do experience some of the effect, but that effect is diminished by the fact that Europe has a much higher density of cell towers than the US does. And since cell phones decrease their radio power output when signal strength is high, the frequency effect of 3G transmission is partially offset by the fact they can use lower power amplifier settings for their radios.

This isn’t good at all. I’ve been lusting for an iPhone since they were launched. MacBreak Weekly and similar podcasts have been on a constant rotation on my iPod. Oh, and to top things off, last week I met a potential client who owns 6 AT&T stores (so, you know, I’d have a reason to be an AT&T customer…)

Nonetheless, I’ve been able to resist plunking down (now) $400 at the Apple store. I keep telling myself that I’m waiting for a 3G version to come out - that and for my Verizon contract to come up in June.

But if my friend, Grant Griffiths, keeps putting up posts like this- he’s going to cost me money and at least one major eye-rolling by my wife when I show her my new “business tool.”

As an added value, here’s the latest MacBreak Weekly. If you’re at all an Apple fan or devotee, it’s a great podcast - totally accessible by the non-geek:

I was looking through the categories I set up last year when I first launched this blog and I noticed the “Increasing Efficiency” category. And then I noticed that I hadn’t spent a lot of time posting on that subject.

So, with that in mind, I want to take the next few posts and share some of my lifehacks that have helped me stay efficient, productive and the ninja you need to be to be successful at this.

With that in mind, my first recommendation is to view a great Google Talk by Merlin Mann of 43Folders called “Inbox Zero.” Inbox Zero is a set of special posts looking at the skills, tools and attitude needed to empty your email inbox - and then keep it that way. Those are Merlin’s words, not mine. It builds on the concepts of Getting Things Done (which is a subject fit for its own series of posts), most importantly the concept of “processing” - this is whole-heartedly recommended.

If you’ve got the time, here’s the video