Sweet Sixteen

In 2008, Airbnb was founded, Bitcoin was invented, the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with the movie Iron Man, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, Apple launched the App Store, and on November 17, 2008, I explained the reasons that I used an iPhone in the first post that started iPhone J.D. Every year since then, I have taken advantage of this website's anniversary to share some statistics about this website that might be interesting to readers. If you want to travel back in time, here are my prior posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Let's light sixteen candles and do it again.

The top 10 posts. As always, we start by looking at which posts over the prior 12 months were read by the most people. The fact that these posts were popular sheds some light on what has been on the minds of attorneys and other folks using an iPhone or iPad. Here are the top ten most viewed posts published in the last year:

1. Review: Eufy SmartTrack Card vs. Rolling Square AirCard -- two ways to add Find My to your wallet. In 2009, Apple released iPhone Software 3.0 with the new Find My iPhone feature. In 2011, Apple expanded upon the idea in iOS 5 so that you could also find your friends. Originally, Find My Friends was a separate app that you had to download, but then it became part of the operating system in 2015 with iOS 9. In 2019, Apple released iOS 13, which combined Find My iPhone and Find My Friends into a single service called Find My and added the ability to find Apple devices even if they were offline. On April 26, 2021, Apple released iOS 14.5 to add the ability to track items, including some third-party trackers and Apple's own AirTag, which went on sale on April 30, 2021. The AirTag is an amazing device, but it is too thick to fit comfortably in a wallet or in other places where you want something flat, so I love that numerous third-party companies now make AirTag-like devices that are flat and the size of a few credit cards. The most popular post on iPhone J.D. during the past year was my review and comparison of two of the most popular versions of these devices. I still keep the Eufy SmartTrack Card in my own wallet ($19.99 on Amazon), and it has been great on the occasions when I have misplaced my own wallet—which fortunately, hasn't happened very often, and has always occurred in my own house.
2. Review: Smart Folio for iPad Pro 13-inch (M4) -- one step forward, but perhaps two steps back? The iPad Pro M4 is such a wonderful device. I carry it back and forth to work every work day, and it is a key part of my law practice as well as something I enjoy using at home. To protect the device as I carry it around, I use this Smart Folio. It works great for protecting the screen, but as I noted in my review, I think that this version is worse than the prior versions of the Smart Folio because it is less stable when used as a stand for the iPad. As a result, when I want to use a stand in my office—which occurs virtually every work day—I take my iPad out of the Smart Folio and place it on the Stabile PRO by Thought Out ($111.98 on Amazon) that I've been using for over a decade.
3. Review: Apple Pencil Pro -- the best way to write, draw, and more on an iPad. One of the reasons that I love my iPad Pro M4 so much is that it is a great device for annotating documents and taking notes, all of which I do with my Apple Pencil Pro. This year's update to the Apple Pencil was long-anticipated, and I suspect that is why this was the third most popular post from the past year.
4. Review: Weather Up -- the weather app that is all about the widget. Many great apps are enhanced by a helpful widget. Weather Up is an app for which the most useful feature is the widget. I almost never use the app itself, but the Weather Up widget on my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac provides a fantastic graphic that tells me the current and forecasted weather.
5. Review: iPhone 16 Pro Max. Apple makes lots of beloved products, but the iPhone is the king, so just like many other years, my review of Apple's newest, top-of-the-line iPhone was one of the most popular posts from the past year.
6. Why lawyers will love the new 2024 iPads. Apple released no new iPads in 2023—the first year without a new iPad since the product debuted in 2010—so I suspect that iPhone J.D. readers were especially interested to learn about the new 2024 models. I know that I was. And these are great models. As noted above, I love the iPad Pro M4, but if you want to pay less for a product that lacks some premium features but is still fantastic, the new iPad Air M2 is also fabulous.
7. Review: Apple Watch Ultra 2. Although the Apple Watch Ultra 2 came out in 2023, I didn't use one until just a few months ago when I tried it out for a few weeks. And yet my 2024 review remains timely because Apple didn't change the Ultra version of the Apple Watch in 2024 except to add a new color, so the Ultra 2 is still a great product to consider buying. For the reasons that I explained in detail in my review of the Apple Watch Series 10, I myself prefer the Series 10 because of its slim design, but I still understand why many would prefer the Ultra 2 because of its unique features including twice the battery life.
8. Using AI to get information from documents in PDF Expert and GoodNotes. Even before Apple announced that AI would be a key feature in iOS 18, it was clear that generative AI technology had the potential to improve the way many of us get work done. The AI features implemented almost a year ago in PDF Expert and GoodNotes are great examples of how useful this technology can be.
9. Review: iPad Pro 13" M4. The iPad-related post above at #6 concerned the announcement of the new iPads. This post at #9 was my review of the iPad Pro M4.
10. Movies on a plane or train with Apple Vision Pro in Travel Mode. I've been using an Apple Vision Pro since the day that it first went on sale earlier this year. I love the product and I use it frequently, but I've never written a formal review of the Apple Vision Pro because it is difficult to judge. This is the first time that I have used Apple hardware that reminds me of beta software in that it is full of promise and provides an exciting preview of the future, but still has lots of shortcomings that I'm sure will be fixed eventually. And unlike beta software, which is typically free. the Apple Vision Pro is expensive: $3,499 for the device itself, plus more if you add prescription lenses (another $149) and a case. But if you decide to spend way too much money like I did, boy is this device incredible! I've only used it while traveling a few times, but if you want to watch a movie on a plane flight or a train trip, nothing else compares to doing so on an Apple Vision Pro. Indeed, whenever I am watching a TV show or movie at my own house, unless I want to watch with someone else or I want to eat and drink while I am watching (possible, but difficult, while wearing this device), the Vision Pro provides the very best experience.

Visitors to iPhone J.D. The other thing I have been doing this time every year is 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 46% of iPhone J.D. readers were using an iPhone, about 24% used a Mac, and about 16% used a computer running Windows. Less than 5% used an iPad. All of those percentages are virtually unchanged from last year. There were 12 people who accessed iPhone J.D. from an iPod—I guess it had to be an iPod touch—in the past year. I'm happy that you visited, but I recommend that you upgrade to an iPhone if you can.

Just looking at browsers (regardless of platform), 59% used Safari, 35% used Chrome, and Edge and Firefox were almost 2% each. Those numbers are also roughly consistent with the last few years.

Of course, the iPhone, iPad, and related Apple technologies of are interest to lawyers and others around the world. About 57% of iPhone J.D. readers during the past year were in the U.S., 8% were from the UK, 6% were from Canada, and the other countries with a significant percentage of readers were, in order, Australia, India, Germany, Singapore, and the Philippines. I learned about the vibrant community of lawyers and other professionals in the Philippines using the iPhone and iPad when I gave an online presentation for Legal Hackers Manila and Abogadong Pinoy back in 2021. Another presenter during that online conference was Brett Burney, and just a few weeks after that conference, Brett and I started the In the News podcast.

Every year, I also look at the top cities for the folks who visit iPhone J.D. London was the #1 city four times (2015, 2020, 2021, and 2023), but every other year, New York has been #1. Indeed, it has been a back-and-forth between those two for the past few years; London was #1 in 2021, New York in 2022, London in 2023, and the Big Apple is back on top again in 2024:

1. New York
2. London
3. Chicago
4. Dallas
5. Los Angeles
6. Ashburn
7. Atlanta
8. San Jose
9. Toronto
10. Singapore

This is the third year in a row that Ashburn, Virginia has been in the Top 10. 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.

This is the second year that San Jose, California has made the Top 10. Of course, San Jose is a major technology hub in California, and both San Jose and Apple's home of Cupertino are in Santa Clara County.

Cities that just missed being in the Top 10 this year include Sydney, Seattle, Melbourne, Miami, Boston, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. My hometown of New Orleans was #56. Sacramento was #100 on the list after last year's entry in the #100 position, Kansas City, moved up to #98. Bologna, Italy was #500 on the list—a wonderful city with amazing food that my wife and I loved visiting in 2022, as I noted in this post about some of the Apple Stores in Italy. And one of the many cities in the world with only a single visitor to iPhone J.D. in the last twelve months was Batman, Turkey, which as we all know—and Wikipedia confirms—was named after the Batman River and not the Caped Crusader.