Ten years ago today — April 3, 2010 — Apple started selling the original iPad. The iPad had been introduced by Steve Jobs on January 27, 2010 (as I noted the next day), but 10 years ago today was the day that folks could start to buy one. Although often I am eager to be one of the first people to purchase new mobile technology from Apple, I didn't start using an iPad until later in 2010. The first iPad seemed very interesting to me, but I wasn't sure how I might use it either in my law practice or at home. But it didn't take long for some attorneys to see the value of the iPad. For example, just a few weeks after the iPad was introduced, Utah attorney Peter Summeril was using Keynote on his iPad to win a jury trial, as he explained at the time in this post. And soon after the iPad was announced, Oregon attorney Josh Barrett, who is now a lawyer with Matchstick, started a great website called Tablet Legal. Unfortunately, that website is now long gone, but for a period of time it was a great resource with tips for making the most of an iPad in a law practice.
As the iPad became an even more useful tool for attorneys, more attorneys started using an iPad. A year after the iPad was introduced, almost 15% of all lawyers were using an iPad. That rose to around 30% in 2012, and for every year since around 2013, somewhere around 40% of all attorneys have reported that they use an iPad. (These numbers come from the annual ABA Tech Survey; see this post for more details.)
The iPad is now a key part of my own law practice, and I know that is true for many of you too. Apple now has an operating system dedicated to the iPad — iPadOS — and thanks to great new features such as the mouse and trackpad support added recently in iPadOS 13.4, the future of the iPad for lawyers looks fantastic. I love the iPad and I look forward to seeing what is coming in its second decade. And now, the news of note from the past week.
- If you are like me, you are attending far more video conferences as a result of COVID-19. One of the most popular video conferencing products is Zoom. In an article for Attorney at Work, Virginia lawyer Sharon Nelson and her husband, security expert John Simek, provide tips for being more secure when you use Zoom.
- If the folks you want to have a video conference with all use an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, group FaceTime calls is a good solution. Leif Johnson of Macworld reminds everyone how to do group FaceTime calls on an iPhone or iPad.
- Barbara Krasnoff of The Verge discuses some of the video conferencing alternatives to Zoom.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that Fantastical now has enhanced support for the new iPadOS 13.4 cursor feature. I look forward to more apps adding this support, and I'm especially looking forward to seeing it on Microsoft Word for iPad.
- If you need to connect to the Internet on an iPad and you don't have Wi-Fi, you can instead connect to an Ethernet cord if you have the right adapter. Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac explains how to use Ethernet with an iPad.
- One of the best weather apps for the iPhone (and iPad) is Dark Sky, which I first discussed on this website in 2012. And many great third-party weather apps, like Carrot Weather, use Dark Sky for their weather data. This week, Apple announced that it is buying Dark Sky. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac offers some thoughts on what this could mean.
- The MacStories website has had lots of stories this week devoted to the 1oth anniversary of the iPad, with more coming today and tomorrow. For example, one post looks at some of the most important iPad apps of the past decade. There are some great apps discussed in that article, such as Fantastical, Workflow, Things, GoodNotes, and Photoshop.
- Ryan Christoffel of MacStories interviewed iPad app developers to discuss the past and future of iPad.
- Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories wrote a great overview of how the iPad emerged from the shadow of the iPhone.
- In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell discusses the iPad then and now.
- Zac Hall of 9to5Mac discusses an adapter that turns standard CarPlay into Wireless CarPlay, although it has some hiccups. Wireless CarPlay sounds like an interesting idea, but I like charging my iPhone when I drive so I don't consider it inconvenient to use the wired version of CarPlay.
- Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal suggests turning an old iPad into a Video Chat Box.
- And finally, the new 2020 version of the iPad Pro uses LiDAR to get a 3D view of the world. Faruk of iPhonedo prepared an interesting 10-minute video on the new iPad, but even if you don't watch the whole thing, you should jump to the 4 minute mark where he uses an infrared camera to show how LiDAR works. I suspect that LiDAR will be coming to the iPhone later this year, and if so, we will be hearing a lot more about this technology in the future.