For over three decades, the ABA has conducted an annual survey of lawyers to find out what legal technology they use. These results are released every year by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center. The 2022 report was just released (edited by Taylor Young, and researched by Taylor Young and Joshua Poje). There are five volumes, and you can purchase a copy using this page of the ABA website.
I have been looking at these reports every year since 2010 because they have been the best source of statistics on the use of mobile technology by lawyers. (My reports on the prior ABA surveys are located here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.) Starting in 2011, the survey asked lawyers what smartphones they use, and from 2011 to 2021, we saw an increase in iPhone use, reaching a record high of 80% in 2021. Android use started at 15% in 2011, increased to a high of 25% in 2018, and has been around 18%-19% since 2019. During those same years, we saw the fall of the once-dominant BlackBerry along with all other smartphone brands other than the iPhone and Android.
Unfortunately, we don’t have updated numbers for 2022. In 2020, the ABA changed the way that it collected data. In odd-number years, the ABA releases a volume called Life & Practice, and that volume asks about the type of smartphone that a lawyer uses. In even-number years such as this one, the ABA replaces that with a volume called Litigation Technology & E-Discovery. The 2022 volumes still contain some interesting data on smartphone and tablet use by attorneys, but not as much we saw last year.
The ABA was kind enough to provide me with a complementary copy of the 2022 volumes. Here are the survey results that relate to smartphone and tablet use that jumped out at me.
Putting the YO into BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
The 2022 ABA survey asked respondents to identify the type of hardware for which they are allowed to select their own brand, model, or type. The #1 response was the smartphone, where 81% of lawyers reported that their law firm let them select what they wanted. We have this policy at my own law firm; the overwhelming majority of attorneys at my firm decide to select an iPhone model, but a small number of attorneys select an Android phone. The #2 response was the tablet, with 55% reporting that they can select their own device. For other device types, less than half of the respondents could select what they want: monitor (43%), printer (37%), desktop (32%), portable accessories (31%), and scanner (30%).
Lawyers were also asked if their law firm allows them to use a personal mobile device such as a tablet, laptop, or smartphone to access the firm’s network. Only 5% said no. However, almost two-thirds of the lawyers said that pre-approval was required and/or restrictions are imposed. I presume that many law firms use some sort of Mobile Device Management (MDM) software to protect both the law firm network and individual attorneys.
Online research
An all-time high of 91% of lawyers reported in 2022 that they do legal research when they are out of the office. That’s up from 88% in 2021, 87% in 2020, and 86% in 2019. The most popular way to do so is with a laptop or desktop computer, with 65% of lawyers saying that they do so regularly and 18% saying that they do so occasionally. But a significant number of lawyers report doing legal research using a smartphone or tablet. 22% reported using a smartphone regularly and 32% report using a smartphone occasionally to do legal research. 18% report using a tablet regularly and another 18% report using a tablet occasionally to do legal research.
One statistic that I’m trying to wrap my brain around is that 2% of lawyers report that they regularly use a smart wearable device to do legal research. I am a huge fan of the Apple Watch, and I regularly use it in my law practice for communication and reminders. But I don’t think that I use my watch for anything that I would call legal research. The only possible exception that I can think of is starting and stopping a timer to track how long I spend doing legal research. Is there something else that I’m not thinking of? If you have an idea for how a smart wearable device can be used for legal research—especially if you yourself are part of that 2% who do this—please let me know!
The iPhone and iPad in the courtroom
Speaking of legal research while out of the office, one such venue for doing so is the courtroom. But of course, there are many other reasons to use an iPhone or iPad in the courtroom, from consulting a calendar to scheduling upcoming dates to giving an appellate oral argument.
According to the survey, 81% of lawyers say that they use a smartphone in the courtroom. And since 2017, the responses to that question have been in the 80% to 84% range, so lawyers have been doing this for some time now. Lawyers at law firms with 100 or more attorneys are somewhat more likely to use a smartphone in the courtroom (87%).
Here is a chart showing what lawyers say that they are doing with their smartphone in court (click to enlarge). The most popular uses are email and calendaring. I was amused to see 25% of lawyers report that they use their smartphone in court to browse the web to kill time—something that I hope attorneys only do while waiting for the judge to enter the courtroom.
Far fewer attorneys report using a tablet device in the courtroom — about 33%. For those who do, top uses are for email, calendaring, legal research, accessing key evidence and documents, real-time communications, and delivering presentations.
This week, Brett and I recorded a special edition of the In the News podcast: the 2022 iGift Guide. Brett and I each picked 10 items that would make perfect gifts for the person in your life who enjoys using Apple mobile products. And if you are reading this, I suspect that these are also gifts that you would love to receive yourself, so now you have some ideas if someone asks you what to get you. Also, if you find yourself with a gift card, these are some great ideas for picking out your own present.
This week we have a great episode of the In the News podcast and I encourage you to check it out. Brett just returned from a four-day hiking trip through the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. He was off-the-grid for most of the trip, but his Apple Watch Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro helped him to navigate the terrain and arrive at the top of Guadalupe Peak, the highest natural point in Texas, in time to take some amazing sunrise pictures. After Brett shares lots of fascinating details about his adventures, we discuss how much safer he could have been if Apple’s new Emergency SOS via a Satellite feature had been active just a few days earlier while he was there, and we also discuss all of the details about this new service. We then discuss some interesting upcoming new features for the Apple Watch and iPhone.
In our In the Know segment, we share tips for preserving battery life. Brett discusses a new low power mode for the Apple Watch, and I discuss whether you should keep 5G turned on or off.
The big iPhone-related news this week was that Apple turned on the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature for all four phones in the iPhone 14 line. If you own one of these phones, you should understand how this system works in case you end up in an emergency. if you don’t yet own an iPhone 14, I’m sure that your next iPhone will have these features. I’ve linked to stories below with more information, but in short, you start by calling 9-1-1. If you don’t have a strong enough signal for that call to go through—using either your own carrier or any other carrier’s signal—then Apple gives you the option to call Emergency SOS via a Satellite. You answer a series of questions about your emergency and you follow on-screen directions to point your iPhone in the correct direction to see a satellite in the sky. The back-and-forth texts with emergency services are slow, but they work, and you can choose to allow your designated emergency contacts to see the back-and-forth conversation on their own iPhone (although they just watch the texts and cannot participate). I’ll share more details in connection with the posts below, along with the other news of note from the past week:
Apple helped Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal test out the Emergency SOS via a Satellite in a way that didn’t actually involve the emergency services folks, and she wrote a great article and prepared an even better video showing how it works.
iJustine went to Apple’s campus in Cupertino to test out the feature as well. Although it looks like she was given the same ability to test as Joanna Stern, her excellent video on YouTube shows off the feature in a different way.
Apple’s press release also contains interesting details on the new service. For example, Apple says that in clear conditions, and with the help of a new text compression algorithm, people can send and receive satellite messages in as little as 15 seconds.
You can test out the feature yourself if you want. On an iPhone 14, go to Settings -> Emergency SOS -> and then under Emergency SOS Via Satellite tap Try Demo. Apple will turn off your cellular radio (to simulate being in the middle of nowhere) and let you connect to a real satellite to see how the process works. You can also have an emergency conversation via text that looks real but which is just a demonstration and doesn’t actually get sent to emergency services.
Even if you don’t need help, you can use this service to share your location with folks even when you are off the grid. As Apple explains in this article, open the Find My app, tap Me at the bottom right, and then just below the words My Location via Satellite, tap Send My Location. You can do this up to once every 15 minutes. That way, if one of your friends who has access to you via Find My opens the Find My app on their device, they will see your last location update via Satellite.
DC Rainmaker writes about the new satellite features and also notes where they work. Right now, it works in the United States—including Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but not Guam or American Samoa. It also works in Canada. Starting next month, it will work in France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. Note that iPhone 14 devices purchased in China, Hong Kong, and Macau will not support the satellite SOS feature. He notes that the feature also does not work very well above 62° latitude, and he shows you on a map what that means. For example, you may not get satellite coverage in many parts of Alaska.
Raymond Wong notes on his Inverse website that iOS 16.2 will provide a new alternative to the always-on display: you can choose to have the screen go completely black, with only the date and time visible.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac writes about some new features coming to the Apple Watch. One that I had not yet heard about is Track Detection. If Apple senses that you are at a running track and you are wearing an Apple Watch Ultra, you can tell your watch which lane you are using for more precise metrics.
Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the Moft Snap Float Folio ($53.99 on Amazon), an iPad case that turns into a stand that raises your iPad to eye level.
Nick deCourville of The Mac Observer notes that if you go to iCloud.com, it now has a brand-new interface. I like using iCloud.com on my PC in my office because it lets me access some features like my Photos, Notes, and other features that I normally wouldn’t be able to access on a PC.
Earlier this year, I reviewed an app called Weather on the Way, a nice app that helps you to see the weather forecast as you are driving across the country. Michael Potuck notes that the app has been updated with a live radar display that can show on a CarPlay screen, which seems like a great new feature.
In an article for Macworld, Dan Moren notes that when Apple acquired Primephonic (a classical music streaming service) in 2021, Apple said that it would launch a dedicated classical music app in 2022. But with not many weeks left in the year, it appears that this may slip into 2023.
If you listen to Audible audiobooks, the service announced this week that you can now access your library and stream books directly to an Apple Watch app without having to sync to an iPhone.
Starting to think about holiday presents? Don’t let the #666 episode number scare you away because in the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, California attorney David Sparks and Stephen Hackett recommend holiday gifts that would be perfect for anyone interested in technology.
Apple announced its Black Friday sale. From November 25 to 28, you will get Apple gift cards when you purchase certain Apple products, such as a $75 gift card with certain AirPods models and a $250 gift card with certain Mac models.
And finally, did you know that two people can use AirPods (or Beats headphones) to listen to audio from a single iPhone or iPad? To show this, Apple released a fun seasonal video that features a lot of snow. The video is titled Share the Joy: AirPods Pro.
iPhone J.D. turns fourteen years old today. When I wrote my first post on this website, in which I explained why I liked using an iPhone in my law practice, I was still trying to encourage attorneys to consider using an iPhone. There is certainly no longer a need to do that. Now, the focus here is on how to make the most out of an iPhone … and iPad, and other Apple mobile technology.
Every year on this anniversary, I take a look back at the past year. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13). Let’s do it again, first by looking at which posts over the prior 12 months were the most popular. The fact that these posts were so popular often sheds some light on what has been on the minds of attorneys and other folks using an iPhone or iPad. Here, in order, are the top ten most viewed posts published in the last 12 months:
Review: LG OLED C1 Series TV — amazing 4K HDR television for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV 4K users. You may not think of a TV as an iPhone accessory, but my LG television has been the perfect way to show off the incredible 4K video and photos that I can take with my iPhone. It also works incredibly well with my Apple TV. LG now sells an updated model, the C2 Series, and it is a little bit brighter, but otherwise both models are excellent and incredibly similar. Right now, they both cost about the same on Amazon, so you might as well get the C2, but if you can find a cheaper price on a C1. I would recommend that you just get the C1.
Review: eufyCam 2 Pro — wireless security camera with HomeKit support. I wrote that review shortly before the thirteenth anniversary last year, but I am including it in this year’s list because it got so many pageviews during the past year. I continue to be very happy with these outdoor security cameras. My wife and I pay attention to them almost daily.
Review: COMPLY Foam Apple AirPods Pro 2.0 Earbud Tips. I wrote that review when I was using my first-generation AirPods Pro, but I continue to use these replacement earbud tips with my second-generation AirPods Pro. For my ears, they are much more comfortable, and unlike Apple’s own tips which don’t stay in my ears very well, these COMPLY tips help my AirPods Pro to stay in place.
Review: Anker Nano Pro (40W). This is a great little product. It is barely bigger than the power adapter that Apple used to include with the iPhone, but it provides 4x the power and has two USB-C ports.
Review: Satechi 108W USB-C 3-Port GaN Wall Charger. This is an even better portable charger. You get 3 USB-C ports. You get 108W, so there is plenty of power for all three ports. It uses GaN so it is much smaller than similar products. It works great in an office—I use mine there every day to provide power for an iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch—and because the prongs fold down, it is also a great travel charger. I’ve been really happy with this device.
Why lawyers will love iPadOS 16. I wrote that post when iPadOS 16 was first announced. We had to wait for iPadOS 16.1 to first try the new operating system on the iPad, but for the most part this new version has worked well. Stage Manager is the one feature on which the jury is still out. Sometimes when I use it, it works great. Other times, it feels like it is still a work-in-progress. Most of the time that I use my iPad, I don’t use the new Stage Manager mode.
Review: Apple Watch Series 7. The larger screen was the major new feature, but for many folks like me who were using older models of the Apple Watch, the Series 7 was a great opportunity to start taking advantage of other features added in the Series 6 such as the increased speed. I’ve been so happy with my Series 7 that I saw no need to upgrade to a Series 8 this year.
Review: MagSafe Battery Pack from Apple — small, lightweight solution for additional iPhone power when you are on-the-go. I’m glad to see that this post made the Top 10 list. When I purchased this product a few months ago, it had already been out for almost a year, so my review was certainly not an early review. But I continue to love this small battery pack, and I encourage you to get one if your iPhone supports MagSafe charging. It is so small that it is easy to slip it in a pocket. It is so easy to use: just put it on the back of the iPhone and let the magnets align it. And it provides lots of extra power to an iPhone to help you get through a long day, even when you have been doing things like taking 4K video that drain the battery.
LIT SUITE — the best litigation apps for the iPad, now available for the Mac. I wrote this post in September because LIT SOFTWARE was a sponsor of iPhone J.D. that month. But I’m sure that the reason that most lawyers read that post is that a major new feature came to the LIT SUITE a few months ago: the ability to run the company’s great iPad apps on a Mac. Whether you are preparing trial exhibits in TrialPad, annotating transcripts in TranscriptPad, or preparing a document production in DocReviewPad, you can now go back-and-forth between the iPad and Mac and continue working in the same apps. No other developer has supported lawyers using iPads as much as LIT SOFTWARE over the years, and I love that they are still finding ways to add major new features to these incredibly useful apps.
Visitors to iPhone J.D. Every year, I use this post to share some statistical information on iPhone J.D. visitors, to the extent that I can figure it out using the tools at my disposal — specifically, the Google Analytics service.
Google Analytics reports that, during the past 12 months, about 48% of readers visited from a smartphone, and 94% of those were iPhones. For folks using a computer to access iPhone J.D., about 53% used a Mac, about 43% used a PC, and about 3% used Linux. There was a single person who accessed iPhone J.D. from a BlackBerry device during this past year; hopefully that person has now updated to an iPhone and is much happier.
About 58% of people accessing iPhone J.D. use Safari. About 32% use Chrome. Edge and Firefox are almost 2% each.
I know that lawyers around the world use the iPhone and iPad. About 53% of iPhone J.D. visitors during the past year were in the U.S., which is about the same as last year. Just over 7% were in the UK, down from 10% last year. The other countries with a large number of visitors were Canada, Australia, Germany, Czech Republic, China, and India.
Every year, I also look at the top cities for the folks who visit iPhone J.D. London was the #1 city in 2015, 2020, and 2021, but every other year, New York has been #1. Well start spreading the news, because the Big Apple is back on top again this year:
New York
London
Prague
Chicago
Los Angeles
Dallas
Ashburn
Atlanta
Singapore
Sydney
There were a few big changes on the list this year. First, Prague in the Czech Republic has never made the Top 10 list before, and this year it was all the way at #3. English is not one of the top languages in Prague, but the city has been called a potential tech giant, and I suspect that the interest in tech provides some explanation for the surprisingly high ranking this year.
Second, I’ve never seen Ashburn, Virginia in the Top 10 list before, although it has been in the Top 20 for the past few years. Ashburn is a relatively small city, but it is a major hub for internet traffic, so perhaps that explains the ranking: people who are actually reading from other locations are being considered residents of Ashburn by the Google Analytics service. Or maybe there are just lots of visitors from Loudoun County, which is in the Washington D.C. area, and they are all being counted as part of Ashburn.
A Canadian city such as Toronto has often been in the Top 10, but for the second year in a row, Toronto was #11 this year. Other cities that just missed the Top 10 list include Melbourne, Seattle, Houston, and Boston. Montreal was #25. New Orleans was #33. Dublin was #50. Cleveland was #100. Fort Lauderdale was #200. And one of the (many) cities with only a single reader of iPhone J.D. during the past year was Valley View, Ohio, with a population of 2,034. If any of you know an attorney in Valley View who uses an iPhone—and I’m especially thinking of you, Cleveland readers—please spread the word about iPhone J.D. Just one new reader will double the number of visitors!
For many years, I have had two kinds of lights in my backyard, in part to provide illumination but mostly just because they look interesting: small lights on a string, similar to what you might put on a Christmas tree, and larger G40-style globes on a string ($18.98 from Amazon) that hang over an outdoor table. For many years I would just manually plug them in to an outdoor outlet when I wanted them to come on. In 2017, I purchased an iHome iSP100 Outdoor Smart Plug so that I could turn the lights on and off without having to even go outside, and I reviewed that plug in 2018. It worked well for many years—I definitely got my $40 in value from it—but a few months ago, it started to have problems working with HomeKit. When I told Siri to turn lights on or off, it didn’t work more often than it did work. At first, I thought it was a problem with Siri, but I eventually realized that the unit itself was starting to fail. Thus, I replaced it with a Meross Outdoor Dimmer Plug with a list price of $30.99 that that is only $17.39 on Amazon. I’ve been using the Meross product for a few months now, and it has been working great. This is a great gift idea for virtually anyone since it works with Apple HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Home, and of course, it would be a great gift to give yourself.
This Meross plug has been a perfect replacement for that iHome product because not only does it do everything that the iHome plug did, it also lets me dim the lights to any level, giving me even more control over how the lights look in my backyard.
The Meross Outdoor Smart Plug has a standard three-prong plug on one end. The other end has a water-resistant outlet that is made to work outdoors (or indoors). I have an extension cord plugged in, and the other end of the extension cord goes to my fence where my lights are located.
Once you are set up, you can tell Siri to turn the lights on or off. You can also tell Siri to adjust the light to any level, from 0% to 100%.
Meross has a free app that you can use to control the device, but I’ve used this product for months without even downloading the app. I just added the Meross Outdoor Dimmer Plug using my iPhone’s built-in Home app and everything worked great. In preparing this review, I finally downloaded the Meross app to see if it does anything special. It has a few extra features, such as the ability to see how good of a WiFi signal the plug is receiving (mine has a 65% and that has been working great), and a feature that lets you test if your lights are compatible with the plug or if they start to flicker at certain brightness levels.
Because this is a standard HomeKit device, you could put your outdoor lights on a timer if you want them to, for example, come on at sunset and turn off a few hours later or at sunrise. That’s not how I use my backyard lights so I haven’t specifically tested this, but that should work since it is just a standard HomeKit function.
When I purchased this device a few months ago, I was surprised to find that it was the only outdoor smart plug that worked with HomeKit and also included a dimmer function. I just did another quick search, and I’m still not seeing another product that includes both functions.
I’m also impressed with the price. The iHome device that I had been using cost me almost $40. The Meross product is less than half the price. I’m also a big fan of Lutron’s Caséta products, which I have throughout my house, and there is a Lutron Caséta Weatherproof+ Outdoor Smart Plug, but it costs almost $100 and doesn’t have a dimmer function. That Lutron product does appear to be more durable; for example, using the IP code scale, the Lutron product is IP65, whereas this Meross product is only IP44. The first number is dust protection and the second number is water protection, so that means that the Meross product, IPx4, can handle water splashing from any direction whereas the Lutron product, IPx5, can handle a water jet from any direction. If you are watering your plants using a hose, I guess you should avoid pointing a jet directly at the Meross device. Normally, I would consider paying more for a more durable product, but given the large price difference—$18 versus $100—I’m willing to risk having to replace the Meross multiple times and still pay less than the Lutron device.
To be fair, there is one more advantage for the Lutron device. Lutron Caséta products use a proprietary Clear Connect technology that is even more dependable than HomeKit over WiFi. This means that the almost $100 Lutron outdoor device should be more dependable when you use Siri or the app to turn it on or off. Having said that, in the few months that I have been using this Meross product, it has worked perfectly every time that I turn it on or off.
Conclusion
I have been incredibly happy with the Meross Outdoor Dimmer Plug. It is very nice when it is dark outside to be able to tell my HomePod or my iPhone or my Apple Watch to turn on the fence lights and, through my window in my living room, see the lights come on. Or, if I’ve been outside for a while and the sun starts to set, I love being able to turn on the outdoor lights using my iPhone or Apple Watch without having to manually plug in a cord. And it is great that I can even dim the lights to get just the right ambiance. On top of all of that, at less than $20, this device is incredibly inexpensive. Note that if you want to independently control three different outdoor devices and you don’t need a dimmer, Meross also sells an Outdoor Smart Plug with 3 Independent Sockets for only $33.75 on Amazon. But if you just want a simple outdoor plug that works with HomeKit and lets you dim outdoor lights, this Meross product is the one to get.
The period from now through the end of the year is when Apple sells more products than ever as a result of the holiday buying season. But a few days ago, Apple released a press release to warn Apple investors and others that the facility in Zhengzhou, China that assembles the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max is “operating at significantly reduced capacity” due to COVID. As Tripp Mickle of the New York Times reports, Zhengzhou is known as “iPhone City” because Apple’s presence is so dominant, and the Foxconn facility in that city can produce 500,000 iPhones a day—Apple’s largest single plant, producing about 80% of all iPhones. But when it cannot produce those 500,000 iPhones, day after day, that has a significant impact on the ability to purchase a new iPhone. China has a “Zero COVID” policy which results in strict quarantines whenever there is a breakout. If you are thinking about buying an iPhone for someone this season, I recommend that you order immediately. For example, I see that if you order an iPhone 14 Pro using Apple’s website right now, the current delivery date is Dec 13 – Dec 19, which is cutting it very close for Christmas and Hanukkah. And now, the news of note from the past week:
A quick programming note: Brett Burney and I are not recording an episode of the In the News podcast this week because Brett is “on assignment,” testing out his new Apple Watch Ultra as he hikes through Texas. Brett, if you are reading this, good luck with the hike, and remember that Apple’s new satellite SOS feature isn’t turned on yet so be safe out there.
One more programming note: if you subscribe to iPhone J.D. via an RSS reader, the feed stopped working for a few days, but it seems to be working again now. If your RSS reader is still not seeing new posts, switch to this updated link instead. Similarly, if you receive new posts from iPhone J.D. via email, I know that newsletter stopped working for a short while, but it started working again this week. If you still are not receiving those emails, check your spam filter to see if you need to teach your email provider that the newsletter is not spam. Or, if you want to subscribe from another email account, you can click here to do so.
Indiana attorney Seth Wilson wrote a good article for The Indiana Lawyer about using the new Continuity Camera feature to use your iPhone as a webcam. He found that it works well but you need some sort of stand for your iPhone. I’ve had similar experiences. The quality of the video is fantastic; my iPhone camera is far better quality than any built-in webcam. But the makeshift system that I worked up to prop my iPhone on the top of my iMac worked well for about half of a videoconference this past week and then the iPhone started to shift its position. Fortunately, I wasn’t speaking at the time, so I could quickly disable the camera feature of Microsoft Teams so that I could adjust the iPhone and then turn my camera back on. I really need a clip that fits well on the top of my iMac and holds the iPhone steady. I’m sure that in a few months we will see tons of products like this on Amazon.
Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses a new announcement from Apple about its Emergency SOS service for the newest iPhones and Apple Watch models. The service will launch later this month and will use 24 low-earth orbit satellites operated by Globalstar—located in Covington, LA, not far from where I live—to relay messages to emergency services. Additionally, iPhone 14 users will be able to send their location via satellite using the Find My app.
Michael Simon of Macworld reports that Apple released iOS 16.1.1 this week, and similar updates for other devices, to patch some bugs and install critical security updates. Update when you can.
The Wallet app on the iPhone can store your driver’s license or state ID, but only if you live in Arizona or Maryland … or, starting this week, if you live in Colorado, according to a report by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac. Although I don’t use Apple’s wallet app, I do have my driver’s license on my iPhone thanks to a special app, and I find it very useful to be able to jump in the car with just my iPhone, without needing to grab my wallet. If you live in a state that supports a digital license, whether it be via the Wallet app or another app, I encourage you to use it.
You may not feel like you are ready for Christmas yet, but Philips is. As Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports, a new product available for this season is the Philips Hue Festavia string lights, featuring 250 smart LED lights on a 20-meter cord. They work with HomeKit, and cost $159.99.
If you are looking for a good movie to watch on Apple TV+, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Causeway, which debuted last week. It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry, both of whom are excellent.
And finally, Apple released a new video this week called Testing Action Mode which, sure enough, shows off the new Action Mode using an iPhone 14 Pro to stabilize video even during extreme shots.
Email has been around for so long that I honestly didn’t think that there was much left to be done to improve the experience. Over the last few weeks, I learned that I was wrong. There is a way to make an email Inbox—and indeed, the whole email experience—vastly better by using a service called SaneBox. I’ve seen this service advertised for years, but I admit that I never really paid much attention to how useful it could be until the company reached out to me about a potential sponsorship of iPhone J.D. this month. That led me to try it out for myself. Now that I’ve started using SaneBox, I’m a convert. SaneBox is a transformative service that works with your existing email service to clean up your Inbox and add tons of new features. The end result is that you can be far more efficient and productive with your email, which is something that virtually everyone can appreciate.
In this post, I will start by explaining how SaneBox works, and then I’ll discuss some of the key features of the service.
How SaneBox works
SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS – OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others. I’m currently using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own. You may have an email account exactly like this one. My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.
SaneBox works by analyzing the headers of your emails. That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from. Your emails stay on your current email server; SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server. And importantly, SaneBox never looks at the content of your email messages. Thus, any confidential information that is in your email never gets analyzed or acted upon by SaneBox. The only way that a SaneBox computer would see something confidential in an email message is if the confidential information was put in the subject line of the email, and even then, SaneBox only reads that information for the purpose of deciding whether and how to sort that email message.
You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers. But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms. The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness.
What SaneBox does
The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis. For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox. For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater. Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews. Messages that SaneBox knows that you don’t want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole. And so on. I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important.
Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day. Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore. I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time. With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important. Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on. Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater. This vastly improves email efficiency.
Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features. Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it. So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don’t turn on the @SaneLater feature in your SaneBox dashboard.
@SaneBlackHole
My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole. When I get an email from someone who I don’t want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don’t want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole. This trains the folder. Future emails from that same person or company will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.
Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email? That’s fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don’t want. But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email. When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.
What if you make a mistake? If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox. SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don’t want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.
Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider? Not really. The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different. Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc. Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox. Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider. But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your emial service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not. While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be. Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter. If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder. And then you are done.
SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way: “Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM. It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore. Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work.”
For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well. Every once in a while, I’ll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox. I’m so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn’t waste my time.
@SaneNews
When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder. This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don’t always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox. Whenever I’m ready to look at them, such as while I’m having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.
Sometimes, I’ll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don’t want to receive. I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I’d rather keep it in my Inbox. For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post. (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter? Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.) Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.
It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email. This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn’t mean that you don’t have easy access to it. It’s not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that. Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder. Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn’t need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.
@SaneLater
The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk. If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don’t want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future. You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.
A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter. So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder. That system isn’t perfect—the spammer may change up the “from” email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.
@SaneCC
If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox. I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox. I don’t have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the “to” field. Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.
@SaneNoReplies
Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don’t reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner? The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.
Here’s how it works. You send an email to someone. Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder. But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder. When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply. The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply. If you see something in there that doesn’t belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.
Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email. If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder.
SaneReminders
What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days? When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com. If three days have passed and you haven’t yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox. What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply? Simply add the word “keep” such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.
Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses. There is a big list of them on this page. Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.
SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc. It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com. On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email. (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.) This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn’t bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.
…and more
This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox. There are lots of them. As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years. For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox. You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you. And you can do so much more.
Price
SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you. It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don’t like the service, simply unsubscribe. And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.
If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the “Snack” tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years. The most popular tier is the “Lunch” tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years. (That’s the tier that I paid for.) You can also get the “Dinner” tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years. There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.
Click here to sign up. That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan.
Conclusion
I’m so glad that SaneBox reached out to me about sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. It gave me an excuse to discover how the service works, and once you try it, it is immediately apparent how useful the service is. That’s why it is nice to take advantage of a free trial of SaneBox. Better yet, as I’ve started to use some of the more advanced features over the past few weeks, I’m now getting even more out of SaneBox. I love the vast reduction in the size of my Inbox, which makes me much more efficient. I also love how SaneBox has helped me to get more out of my emails, with features like SaneNoReplies and SaneReminders. And perhaps best of all, there is something incredibly gratifying about moving an email into the @SaneBlackHole folder, knowing that I won’t be bothered by a particular sender ever again. If you have never heard of SaneBox before, or if you are like me and you have heard about it but never took the time to pay much attention to it, I encourage you to check it out. I think that you will really like it.
If I schedule a videoconference meeting for next Tuesday at 3pm in New Orleans, what time will that be for the folks joining me for the meeting in Tokyo and Melbourne and San Francisco? Rather than conduct the mental math yourself (and risk forgetting about accounting for daylight savings time or otherwise making a mistake in the process), you can use an iPhone app to do the work for you. Although there are quite a few time zone apps in the App Store, the app that I’m reviewing today, Zones, works very well and has a nice interface. The developer is Squircle Apps LLP, which I mention up front because there are a lot of apps in the app store that have “Zones” in the app name. The link at the bottom of this post (and right here) will open the App Store to the app that I am reviewing today.
Cities
When you launch this app, the top part of the iPhone screen lists cities—specifically, cities that you select by using the plus sign at the top right. You don’t have to select your own city for this list, but I like doing so because it makes it easy for me to compare the time in my city (New Orleans) to another city.
Once you have cities in the list, you can tap and drag any of them up or down if you want to change the order. Or, if you select the settings icon at the top left (the gear), you can choose how to sort them. My favorite is to show the time zones East to West, but you can also show them West to East or alphabetically.
You can also choose to use a 12-hour time format or a 24-hour time format.
If you tap on the name of a city, you can rename the city. For example, if Jacques lives in Paris, you can add the city Paris and then rename it to “Jacques.” This makes it faster to schedule meetings involving Jacques in the future without needing to think about what city he is in.
Calculations
The bottom portion of the screen helps you to perform time calculations. This is the part that you use if you are scheduling a meeting for a specific time in the future. This part of the app lets you select a time in your time zone and then see what time that would be in a different time zone. First, select the date in your home city by pressing the button at the middle of the bottom of the app. Next, tap the time underneath the words “Your Time Zone” to select the time you were thinking of. Finally, scroll the white ball from left to right to change the time and see what impact that has in the other time zones that matter to you. As you do so, the background will change from a light color (when the sun is up) to a dark background (at night) so there is far less risk of you thinking that you selected 3pm when you instead selected 3am.
As you select the time at the bottom, the items at the top will change as well to reflect what time (and in some cases, what day) it will be at the other locations.
If you tap the share button, you can easily create a text or email that states the selected time in your own time zone and what that means for the other time zones. You can then edit what the app added automatically and type the rest of your text or email without worrying about whether the time calculations are correct. This is a nice feature.
Widgets
If it is helpful for you to have even faster access to the current time in another location, Zones also includes widgets. Select a city, and the widget will display the current time in that city along with an icon indicating whether it is night or day. The widget also tells you how far ahead or behind that location is, should you wish to do some mental math.
Reminders
The Zones app also has a reminder feature that makes it easy to select a time for a certain event based on a time zone. For example, if you want to send your friend in Brazil a happy birthday email just as the clock strikes midnight in Brazil, this app can help you to create such a reminder.
Cross-platform
Zones works on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And it uses iCloud to sync. Thus, once you select your favorite cities on one device, that populates to your other devices as well. Here is what Zones looks like on an iPad:
Conclusion
If you ever work or communicate with people in different time zones, this is a great little app. The interface is clean and simple, and the app has just the right amount of features: some powerful ones that make sense, but not so many features that the app becomes hard to use.
In this week’s episode of the In the News podcast, Brett Burney and I discuss Apple’s recent financial results, focusing on the products that Apple is selling the most. We also discuss the new Apple TV 4K (third generation), the camera on the iPhone 14 Pro, features we can currently use in iOS 16.1, and one feature that might be coming in iOS 16.2. We also discuss whether the Apple Watch Ultra makes sense for folks who are not using it to go scuba diving, climb mountains, go on hikes, or for other more extreme activities.
Speaking of which, Brett will be trying out his new Apple Watch Ultra on a hike next week, so it will be two weeks before we record the next episode of the podcast. On the next episode, I’m sure we will hear lots about Brett’s adventures.
In our In the Know segment, we share tips for using GaN chargers when you travel, and specifically, Brett discusses the Anker 737 Charger (GaN Prime 120W). I recommend using the new Continuity Camera feature, using your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac, because the camera quality is so much better than any webcam.
