Are Lawyers Really Flocking to Macs, iPhones, and iPads?

Yes. Maybe. We don't know!
Microsoft shot itself in the foot. Windows 8 was a disaster meant for touch screens, and not coincidentally, since its release, the PC market has tanked. Yeah, mobile devices, tablets, yadda yadda, but look at operating system market share in terms of percentages: Windows 8 is lagging behind freaking Windows XP. That's bad.
Law firms need computers. And since they aren't buying Windows 8 PCs, are they going Mac?
Survey(s) Say: Maybe
Clio released its annual Apple in Law Offices report this morning and there was one glaring statistic:
Sixty-six percent of respondents chose Mac computers, versus 34 percent on Windows.
Ho. Lee. Crap., right? And over half of those surveyed chose Apple for security and reliability. (Whoops. At least Apple's massive security flaw was a rarity. My Dell seems to have a new patch every hour.)
Except, here's my favorite question about surveys: who was sampled? Clio's response: respondents included their users, MILO (Macs in law Office) conference attendees, and open social media responses.
So, yeah. MILO users are going to skew those results a bit, we'd imagine. That being said, if one simply looks at U.S. PC sales overall, Mac sales grew 28.5 percent year-over-year in Q4 2014. That's now lawyer-specific, but it is an encouraging sign for Mac aficionados.
Mobile's All Apple
What else did Clio's survey say:
Apple rules mobile, with iPhone usage at 74 percent, and iPad usage at 67 percent of respondents. Even with a MILO caveat, that jibes with results from the ABA's Legal Technology Survey Report (73% of lawyers were using iPhones) and ILTA's tech survey (97% of firms had iPhones in use), though it is slightly more Apple-optimistic than Clio-rival MyCase's findings on the subject (49 percent of their respondents use iPhones). MyCase's survey, for context, was done nearly a year ago.
Either Way, Apple's Trending
Surveys, samples, and caveats aside, there is a clear trend in both mobile and desktop choices.
In mobile, though Apple's overall market share is falling to a flood of cheaper Android devices, every survey we've seen of lawyers shows that our kind prefers the Cupertino-designed devices. As for desktops, well, Windows better pray that Windows 9 beats 8.
Apple? Mac? PC? Blackberry? Join the discussion on Facebook.
Editor's Note, March 8, 2016: This post was first published in February 2014. It has since been updated.
Related Resources:
- Law Firms and Social Technology: Ineffective and Slow Paced (FindLaw's Technologist Blog)
- Three Viable Alternatives to iOS and Android (FindLaw's Technologist Blog)
- Let's Reinvent the Court Opinion: 4 Ideas (FindLaw's Technologist Blog)