Seventeen years of iPhone J.D.

Seventeen years ago today, I started this website with a post about why I used the iPhone. Today, that seems like an odd thing to explain, but back in 2008, only a tiny percentage of lawyers were using an iPhone. If a lawyer was using a smartphone back then, it was most likely to be Blackberry. Every year since then, I have taken advantage of this website’s anniversary to share some information 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, 15, and 16.

The top 10 posts. As always, we start by looking at which posts over the prior twelve 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 iPhones or iPads. Here are the top ten most viewed posts published in the last year:

1. Review: iPhone 17 Pro Max. Apple announced a few weeks ago that it believed that its revenue during the quarter that we are in right now—which includes all of the holiday sales—will be the best quarter in the history of Apple. Clearly, that is because Apple believes that there is a lot of interest in the 2025 versions of the iPhone. My data point to confirm that is that my review of the iPhone 17 Pro Max wasn’t just the #1 post of this year. It is one of the most-read posts in the history of this website.
2. Review: AirPods Pro 3. AirPods are a fantastic accessory for the iPhone. AirPods Pro are the best version of the AirPods, and when Apple released the new AirPods Pro 3 this year, it had been three years since the AirPods Pro 2 came out. I suspect that sales of the AirPods Pro 3 will be very impressive this quarter.
3. Apple’s generous 14-day return policy. It was just over a year ago that I wrote that post, but I’m still including it in this year’s list because it saw so much traffic over the past twelve months. I guess that folks thinking about buying Apple products were also thinking about whether they could return a product if it wasn’t right for them.
4. Review: Kodak Slide N Scan Digital Film Scanner — bring your past into the future. One of my personal projects this past year has been digitizing old photos and videos. This Kodak scanner made it easy to digitize hundreds of old slides that my parents had taken in the 1980s. Thanks to this scanner, some of those old photos now show up on the home screens of my iPad and iPhone (using the Photos widget), and it always makes me smile to see them.
5. Why lawyers will love the 2025 Apple Watch models. The first version of the Apple Watch went on sale on April 24, 2015, and I reviewed it a few days later. Starting in 2016, Apple has released new versions of the Apple Watch every September. My guess is that most iPhone J.D. readers already own an Apple Watch, so the question for iPhone J.D. readers every September is whether it is a good year to upgrade. My post on the 2025 Apple Watch models provided some advice on whether it was worth upgrading to the Apple Watch Ultra 3, Apple Watch Series 11, or Apple Watch SE 3.
6. All of Apple’s Immersive Video content for the Apple Vision Pro. Perhaps the best thing to watch on the Apple Vision Pro is the immersive video content released by Apple. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t maintain a single, up-to-date, list of all of its immersive content. So I made one, and I update that post when new content is released—such as last week, when Apple released the video Flight Ready on Veterans Day. I even created a special URL for that page because I know that it is accessed so often: https://iPhoneJD.com/AppleImmersive.
7. Review: Happy Scale — track and predict your weight loss. If you are trying to lose weight, you can track your progress using the built-in Health app from Apple. But if you want more options, there are countless third-party apps in the App Store to choose from, and Happy Scale is one of the very best. It has a great interface, offers tons of insights, and—perhaps best of all—it shows your progress on a graph that smooths out the data. Thus, instead of seeing the inevitable ups and downs along the way, you focus on the overall progress over time.
8. Review: Anker Laptop Power Bank — portable power, smart design. I gave this product a very positive review earlier this year, and I love it even more now than I did then. It has a fantastic design, it holds a ton of power, it charges multiple devices at once, it has a useful display, and the built-in cords are incredibly convenient. It works great with a laptop computer, but I primarily use mine with my iPad, iPhone, and Vision Pro. This device also makes a great gift, especially right now, because it is currently only $91.99 on Amazon. That is an amazing price (32% off) and less than I paid for mine.
9. Why lawyers will love iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. Apple updates its operating systems every year, but some years, the updates are even bigger than others. This was a big year, and I discussed why in the post that is #9 on this list.
10. Why lawyers will love the new iPad Air. As much as I love using my iPad Pro, I know that most lawyers don’t need an iPad with all of the bells and whistles—not to mention a higher price. The 2025 version of the iPad Air is an excellent device that is perfect for most lawyers, as I explained in this post.

Visitors to iPhone J.D. The other thing I do this time every year is share some statistical information about 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, over the past 12 months, about 37% of iPhone J.D. readers used an iPhone, about 19% used a Mac, about 15% used a computer running Windows, and less than 5% used an iPad. Those numbers didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that about 18% of iPhone J.D. readers during the past twelve months were using an Android device. In past years, that percentage has been 10% or less, sometimes less than 5%. I certainly discuss and review lots of products that work with any smartphone, so maybe that explains it, or perhaps there have been a lot of Android users thinking about making the switch to an iPhone.

Just looking at browsers (regardless of platform), there was another notable change this year. In the past, the #1 browser used to read this website has been Safari. For example, last year, 59% of the people reading iPhone J.D. used Safari. But this year, the #1 browser was Chrome, which accounted for 49% of all readers. About one-third of those Chrome users were using Android, just under one-third of the Chrome users were using Windows, and just about all of the other Chrome users were using a Mac or Linux device. The #2 browser used to read iPhone J.D. was Safari, with 46% of users. That left about 5% of readers using Edge, Firefox, or another browser.

Of course, the iPhone, iPad, and related Apple technologies are of interest to lawyers and others around the world. About 45% of iPhone J.D. readers during the past year were in the U.S., 6% were from the UK, 5% were from Norway, 5% were from Canada, and the other countries with a significant percentage of readers were India, Australia, Singapore, China, Russia, and Germany.

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. Just like in 2024, the Big Apple was on top again in 2025:

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

Note that I believe that Ashburn shows up in this list because it is a major hub for internet traffic. If you ignore Ashburn, then that would make San Jose #7, Dallas #8, Toronto #9, and Boston would become #10—just barely beating out Atlanta.

Besides Atlanta, other cities that just missed being in the Top 10 this year include Sydney, Miami, Seattle, Des Moines, Phoenix, Melbourne, and Houston. My hometown of New Orleans was #105 this year, a big drop from its #56 position last year. The #100 position was Zurich. The #200 position was Belgrade. Syracuse was #300. The city of Roswell, New Mexico, had only 12 unique visitors to iPhone J.D. during the past twelve months, and Google Analytics doesn’t tell me how many of them were aliens living on a UFO at Area 51.

One particularly nice change for iPhone J.D. that occurred during the last twelve months was that, in early 2025, I switched from hosting this website on TypePad to using the WordPress platform. There were a lot of other behind-the-scenes changes that took place at the same time, and one of the end results is that this website now loads much faster than ever before: a welcome change for everyone, no matter what device you are using and where in the world you are located.

Finally, and most importantly, whether you read every single post on this website or you just check in from time to time, I’m thrilled to have you here, and I’m already looking forward to the next twelve months.