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Last week, I attended the American Bar Association’s annual legal technology conference, ABA TECHSHOW 2025. It was the 40th year of this conference, and in light of that anniversary, there were parts of the conference that looked back on how far legal technology has come over the decades. But as always, the core focus was on how technology can improve the practice of law today and in the future.

Unsurprisingly, AI was a major theme of this year’s conference. There were tons of educational sessions specifically devoted to that topic. Even in the sessions with a different focus, there was often at least some reference to AI. And on the Expo floor, almost all of the vendors were talking about how they were incorporating AI to make their products better. Seeing one topic become so predominant throughout the conference reminds me of 2009, when the iPhone was just taking off and there was so much excitement at TECHSHOW about the best iPhone apps for attorneys, and 2013, when so many attorneys were starting to understand the promise of the iPad and so many of the TECHSHOW vendors were emphasizing how well their services worked on an iPad. Of course, nowadays, being able to use a legal technology product on the iPhone and iPad is virtually a given, so much so that the only thing considered remarkable is when an offering lacks iPhone/iPad support.

Last week, one of the sessions that I taught was a fast-paced, jam-packed hour-long session on tips and tricks for being more productive with an iPhone and iPad in a law practice. There was so much to discuss, and I could have easily gone for at least another hour.

The other session that I taught, along with Prof. Kenton Brice of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, focused on the newest technology from Apple—the Vision Pro—and explored not only how lawyers can use this product today but how future VR and AR technology will allow lawyers to represent their clients more effectively, especially in litigation.

The keynote address was delivered by technology activist Cory Doctorow. It was incredibly thought-provoking and addressed numerous topics that are at the intersection of technology and the law, such as antitrust regulations and user privacy. I don’t agree with everything that Doctorow said, but he made a lot of good points and delivered them eloquently.

As always, there were lots of interesting sessions and not enough time to see everything, but I enjoyed the sessions that I did see. Here are Texas attorneys Mark Unger and Mitch Zoll discussing ways to use AI in a law practice:

Here is my podcast co-host Brett Burney along with Tara Cheever of Lit Software presenting a slide to discuss the exciting technology of USB-A. (Just kidding; they were talking about presenting evidence at trial using an iPad.)

On Thursday night, Brett and I hosted a fun dinner at the Italian restaurant Petterino’s. We were joined by North Carolina attorney Shaunis Mercer, Prof. Savanna Nolan of the University of Georgia School of Law, Atlanta attorneys Mike Dunham and Gregory Jacobs, San Antonio attorney Mark Unger, Ian O’Flaherty of Lit Software, and Cleveland attorney Paul Schumacher. In this picture, we are joined by Bill Vance (CTO of my law firm, Adams and Reese) and his wife who shared some laughs with us during the evening.

Friday morning, Brett Burney and I recorded the most recent episode of the In the News podcast from the Expo floor. It is rare to have the chance to record while we are in the same room, and it was especially nice that we had some guests on the podcast, including Vance and Washington, D.C. attorney Michael Eisenberg.

Friday night, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of TECHSHOW, there was a 1980’s-themed party. A few folks at the party looked like they were still in the 1980s, including Barron Henley and Gina Roers-Liemandt, and I got a chance to use a cellphone that was about the same size as the one that my father used in the 1980s.

Reid Trautz of the American Immigration Lawyers Association wore items from TECHSHOW 1998 and TECHSHOW 2011.

Here is Steve Embry, one of the co-chairs of TECHSHOW 2025.

The Expo floor was very active this year, with vendors showing off the latest and greatest in legal technology. I found it valuable to talk directly to many of these companies about their products, and I saw quite a few things that I hope to soon have at my own law firm so that I and others can use them. Unfortunately, I was too busy to spend any time in the Puppy Lounge sponsored by Clio, but I did enjoy watching the puppies march in Friday morning as Brett and I were recording the podcast. (Check out the video at 52:37.)

Finally, it was fantastic to talk to so many iPhone J.D. readers and In the News podcast listeners at TECHSHOW—some of whom I have met in the past and others who I was meeting for the first time.

I’ll end with this post with a picture of some of the past chairs of ABA TECHSHOW from the 1990s to today: Brett Burney (2015, 2026), David Bilinsky (1998, 1999), Natalie Kelly (2014), Tom Mighell (2008, 2018), Paul Unger (2011), Roberta Tepper (2021), Dan Pinnington (2007), Jim Calloway (2005), Debbie Foster (2010, 2018), Allan MacKenzie (2021), Catherine Sanders Reach (2020), Cynthia Thomas (2024), Ivan Hemmans (2022), Reid Trautz (2012), and Steve Best (2016).

I hope to see many of you in Chicago next year at ABA TECHSHOW 2026, which will take place March 26-28, 2026.

Brett and I recorded this week’s episode of the In the News podcast on the Expo floor of the ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago. Unfortunately, the sound is not as good as our normal episodes because we had bleed through from one microphone to the next one. I apologize that it is a little distracting when you first start to listen, but my hope is that you will get used to it pretty quickly and then you can just enjoy the episode. And there was so much to talk about this week from iOS 18.4 and the other big software updates of the week and some of the latest developments in the world of legal technology. Thank you to special guests Michael Eisenberg of The Tech-Savvy Lawyer, Bill Vance of Adams and Reese, and a bunch of cute puppies for joining me and Brett during the podcast.

In our In the Know segment, Brett discussed the QR code feature of LinkedIn, and I discussed using the Shared With You feature on the iPhone and iPad, especially in Safari.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Apple released lots of updates this week. For the iPhone and iPad, we now have iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4. It adds new emoji, the Apple News Food section in Apple News+, four different Ambient Music selections that you can trigger using the Control Center, priority notifications, EU support for Apple Intelligence, iPhone 15 Pro support for Visual Intelligence, a new Sketch style in the Image Playground app, support for robot vacuums in the Home app, and much more. For the Apple Watch, we now have WatchOS 11.4, which gives you the option for your wake up alarm to make a sound even if your watch is in silent mode assuming that you are using the Sleep focus mode to trigger the alarm. The Apple Vision Pro gets visionOS 2.4 which makes it much easier to share your Vision Pro with someone else thanks to a companion app for the iPhone/iPad, plus it adds the cool Spatial Gallery app and initial Apple Intelligence support. And there are updates for the Apple TV and the Mac. I suspect that these are the last significant operating system updates before we learn about major new features at WWDC in two months and those features are released this Fall, but we will see. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• I’m in Chicago right now at ABA TECHSHOW. Brett Burney is here as well, and our plan is to record this week’s episode of the In the News podcast on the Expo floor this morning. Hopefully, all will go well, but if there is any delay in the episode showing up in your podcast app or on YouTube, I’m sure it will be because we are switching up our normal routine.
• Chance Miller of 9to5Mac discusses the major new features of iOS 18.4.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider discusses a few of the new features of iOS 18.4, including some minor improvements to CarPlay.
• Joe Rossignol of MacRumors discusses the new Ambient Music feature in iOS 18.4, which you can add to your Control Center. I’ve checked it out, and it is nicely done. I like the Chill and Productivity channels for having something in the background while I get work done. On the other hand, the Wellbeing channel doesn’t do it for me.
• Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses the new Apple News Food feature of Apple News+. Content comes from Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats. And the layout is very nice. With this new section, Apple News+ now has sections for News, Sports, Food, Puzzles, and just about any other topic that you manually add. The service has turned into a very nice, modern newspaper, and I love that.
• In iOS 18.4, Safari works differently when you open a new tab: it shows your recent search terms. If this is a privacy concern for you (because you share your device), Tim Hardwick of MacRumors explains how to disable this feature.
• Of course, there are also security fixes in iOS 18.4, as noted by Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider notes that the Mail interface on the iPad has been updated in iPadOS 18.4 to match the recent update to the Mail interface on the iPhone. This includes the Inbox categorization feature, which I immediately turned off but perhaps others will find it useful.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac discusses the new Apple TV interface changes in tvOS 18.4.
• As noted by Amber Neely of AppleInsider, on Monday, Apple very briefly released watchOS 11.4 for the Apple Watch, but before I could try to download it, it disappeared. Then it reappeared on Tuesday morning, then it disappeared again. Then it came back again on Tuesday afternoon. I took a risk and installed it on Tuesday afternoon, and nothing bad happened to my Apple Watch. Yet.
• Apple is releasing a new Immersive Video for the Apple Vision Pro today. VIP: Yankee Stadium features an all-encompassing look at how elite athletes, die-hard fans, dedicated staff, and epic moments make the Bronx ballpark legendary.
• As a reminder, I keep an updated list of all of Apple’s Immersive Video content on this page.
• Twenty Thousand Hertz is a great podcast about sound. The latest episode discusses sound aspects of Apple accessible technology and it is really interesting. It includes interviews with Apple employees who work to make Apple products more accessible.
• Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that five VPN apps in the App Store have been found to have links to the Chinese military, according to a report in the Financial Times.
• Since President Trump has allowed Elon Musk to control so much of the U.S. government at the same time that Musk owns Starlink, Musk has been able to convince federal regulators to make life more difficult for Globalstar, a competitor of Starlink, as reported by Drew FitzGerald, Mich Maidenberg, and Keach Hagey of the Wall Street Journal. This has important implications for the iPhone becuase Apple is investing heavily in satellite technologies through Starlink.
• The amazing show Severance on Apple TV+ may be over, but now we have a new great show to start watching on AppleTV+: The Studio. I really enjoyed the first two episodes, and I agree with almost everything that John Gruber of Daring Fireball says about the series in this post. If you haven’t checked out the show yet, you should do so.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac shares a tip for creating a shortcut to trigger Noise Cancellation mode on the AirPods Pro 2.
• And finally, AirPods Pro 2 is now available in Australia, and Sarah Berry of The Sydney Morning Herald and Age flew to Cupertino to interview Kate Bergeron and Dr. Rajiv Kumar of Apple to discuss the product and the hearing aid feature in this video:

The shortlist of app developers that have made the biggest contributions to iPad use by lawyers since the iPad was announced in 2010 includes two huge companies (Apple and Microsoft) and one small company that is hyper-focused on lawyers: Lit Software. Lit Software has been making great iPad apps for lawyers since the year that the iPad was first introduced. Almost fifteen years later, its apps, such as TrialPad and TranscriptPad, are essential tools for many litigators. As of just a few weeks ago, the company now has five apps, and you get access to all of the apps as a part of the Lit Suite subscription. The fifth and newest member of the suite is TimelinePad.

The name of this new app tells you what it does. TinelinePad lets you create and interact with timelines so that you can organize the evidence in your case. Better yet, since Lit Software knows quite a bit about presenting evidence thanks to its work on TrialPad, the TimelinePad app was built from the ground up with the ability to present interactive timelines to jurors, judges, mediation participants, or any other audience. Lit Software has been working on this app for years, and the care that went into creating this app really shows. This is a great new app for lawyers.

Creating events

The purpose of this app is to show events on a timeline, so of course, the first step in using this app is to create events associated with specific dates. For each event, you can assign either a date or a date range (and you have the option to assign a time). You can assign a title of up to 64 characters and, optionally, a subtitle of up to 128 characters and a description of up to 256 characters. To make it easier to associate similar events on a timeline, you can assign a color and/or a symbol or emoji with each event, such as a telephone, envelope, document, dollar sign, etc.

You can attach documents to an event to make it easy to see the document associated with an event whenever you look at it.

You can also assign one or more tags to an event. A tag can be something like an issue in your case, a specific person, a specific company, or a specific place. Tags are my favorite feature in the TranscriptPad app, so I’m glad to see this feature implemented in this app as well.

Although it is easy to create events in the TimelinePad app itself, you can also import them from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Because so many apps for lawyers have an export to spreadsheet option, this option makes it easy to transfer dates and events from another system to TimelinePad. Also, it can be faster to get up and running by entering most of the information for events in Excel and then exporting to TimelinePad for the final adjustments. To make that easy, there is an option in the app to export a blank Excel template that has all of the fields created for you: state date, start time, end date, end time, title, subtitle, description, and even tags: you type words separated by commas, and each of them will become a tag. When you are done typing your information in the spreadsheet, import the spreadsheet into TimelinePad, and your events will be created. At that point, you can customize things like color and the symbol/emoji.

Speaking of Excel, you can also export a timeline to Excel. Or you can export to PDF.

Viewing events on a timeline

Although it is nice that you can export a timeline, you are most likely to want to view it in the app—either on your iPad, or, more likely, when connected to an external monitor. You can view a timeline in many different ways.

Of course, you can view everything on a traditional timeline, and that is probably the main thing that you will do with this app.

You can pinch to zoom in or out of the timeline, and that gesture is great because it is so easy and intuitive, but I actually prefer to use the sliders at the bottom of the timeline because I find that to be more precise, plus it gives me a sense of the big picture at the same time that I decide how much I want to focus on a specific date range.

You can also see a list of the events in date order. Or you can see list of events that are associated with a tag.

Presentations

Creating a timeline for your own use can help you to gain perspective. However, I suspect that most people will want to use this app to show timelines to others. There are two different and equally useful ways to do this in the app.

First, there is War Room mode. Connect your iPad to an external monitor (for example, use AirPlay to wirelessly connect to an Apple TV that is connected to a monitor, or you can directly connect an iPad to a monitor). Everyone looking at the screen will see everything that you see on your own iPad screen. For example, if you are discussing a case with your colleagues, it can be useful for you and your team to see the list of events associated with a specific tag—for example, a specific company or a specific issue in the case—and seeing those events in date order may help you with your strategy, such as preparing your theory of the case. Seeing events on a timeline in date order grouped by something like an issue or a person is a great way to explore the relationships between the events in your case.

A second presentation mode is called Present. If you have used TrialPad before, you will understand this mode: you see everything on your iPad’s screen, but the audience sees just the timeline. In this mode, you can pick a tag on your iPad and then tap each event associated with a tag. As you do so, the audience that is only seeing the timeline will see different events highlighted on the timeline. There are two modes for doing this: one where the event is highlighted, and another where the event is enlarged and floats above the overall timeline—similar to a callout in TrialPad. These two modes make it easy for the audience to follow along as you guide the audience through the events in date order (or reverse date order or whatever makes more sense for you) while still understanding where each event falls on the overall timeline. When you are going through events in date order, you can use the left and right arrows at the bottom of the screen to move forward or backward through events.

If you know that you will want to focus on a specific part of your timeline when you do a presentation, you can create a Scene. A Scene is a snapshot of time, such as a particular month or series of months. By creating multiple scenes, you can quickly zoom to specific parts of the timeline that you selected beforehand without having to pinch and zoom to recreate it while you are in front of a jury.

Layers and more

Even though this app was released very recently, it has already received numerous updates, including a significant one to add a new feature called Layers. You can assign specific events to a layer and then turn specific layers on or off to show just certain events in a timeline at once. I suspect that this feature will be popular.

Other new features for TimelinePad are in the works, including the ability to annotate an attachment to an event (which sounds to me like bringing some of the power of TrialPad into this app), the ability to add a video to an event (such as surveillance video or a deposition clip), and the ability to import from from other Lit Software apps (such as impeachment slides from TranscriptPad—a feature that I discussed in this post).

One feature that I think that would improve this app is an Undo feature. The developer tells me that this feature exists on the Mac version of the app—which I had not noticed because I’ve been using this app exclusively on my iPad—but he says that Undo is still a work in progress on the iPad. [UPDATE 2/2/2025: See the comments to this post for an update from Ian O’Flaherty, the developer of this app, on the Mac version of this app.] Of course, you can manually undo something that you did; for example, if you change an event color from blue to red and then change your mind, you can just assign it a blue color again.

It is not surprising that so many updates have been released and are planned because in the almost 15 years that I have been using LitSoftware products, the company has always been very good about adding new features to its apps. For example, TranscriptPad has been available since 2012, but it still receives significant updates, such as the useful ability to sync video that was added just over a year ago.

Price

Lit Software no longer sells individual apps. Instead, you purchase a subscription to LitSuite. That gets you all of the company’s apps: TrialPad, TranscriptPad, DocReviewPad, ExhibitPad, and TimelinePad. It is similar to purchasing a subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and getting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. For a single user, the price is $600 a year, which gives you all of the apps for the iPad and for the Mac (except for ExhibitPad, which is an iPad-only app). If you want to purchase a subscription for multiple people in your organization at a discount, you can reach out to LitSoftware to take advantage of the company’s Enterprise Program.

Conclusion

I first heard about the idea of this app a few years back when I was talking to the developers at the ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago. This year’s conference starts tomorrow, and it is great that this app is no longer just an idea but instead is now a tool that I and other lawyers can use when working on our cases. And with this app, there is now one more reason that the iPad is such an essential device for so many lawyers.

Click here to get TimelinePad.

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This article won the LitigationWorld Pick of the Week award on April 10, 2025. The editors of LitigationWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for litigators and others who work in litigation, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.

Thank you to Sanebox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. SaneBox is a service that changes your relationship with email. Looking at your Inbox no longer means having to weed through tons of messages that you don’t need right and now may not want at all. Instead, when you open your Inbox, you essentially see just the good stuff that matters.

How does SaneBox do this? Less important emails, such as newsletters, are moved to subfolders so that you can deal with them when you have time, and it is often faster to deal with all of those at once. And if you tell SaneBox that there is an email sender from which you never want to see email again, those go to the Black Hole folder.

If this general approach sounds familiar, it should. Apple started doing something sort of similar in iOS 18.2, where it tries to manage your mailbox by sorting messages. However, the way that SaneBox does this is infinitely better than what you get in iOS—just like many other third-party apps for things like calendars, podcasts, reminders, passwords, etc., are much more sophisticated than Apple’s built-in apps.

First, the mail sorting feature introduced iOS 18.2 only applies to the iPhone, so when you use a Mac or an iPad, you don’t see it at all. SaneBox works at the mail server level so it works no matter what you use to read your email—iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, Apple Watch, etc.

Second, SaneBox gives you complete control over how the sorting takes place, and as I’ve explained in the past, that makes all of the difference. For example, if SaneBox moves a newsletter into its @SaneLater folder, but you know that this one particular newsletter is important to you and that you want it to always stay in the Inbox so that you see it right away, simply drag an email containing the newsletter from @SaneLater to your Inbox. That’s it. That teaches SaneBox that you want future issues of that newsletter to go to your Inbox.

The end result is that SaneBox lets you avoid the distraction of dozens of non-essential emails in your Inbox. Instead, your Inbox just contains the few messages that really matter, the ones that you want to know about and/or need to act upon. When you have more time, you can click the sub-folder in your Inbox into which SaneBox stores items like email newsletters—things that you want to see at some point, but there is no urgency to read right away. Or you can click the sub-folder in your Inbox into which SaneBox filters items to be read later. For me, these are mostly junk messages missed by my email’s built-in spam filter. For unwanted items, you can drag them over into your @SaneBlackHole folder, which teaches SaneBox’s brain that you never want to see items from that sender ever again.

SaneBox offers much more than what I’ve just described. For example, it can remind you when you haven’t received a response to an email, and it can filter emails in countless other ways. But those core features make the process of reading your email so much faster and so much less annoying.

I’ve been paying for and using SaneBox for over two years, and I find the service well worth it. For my iPhone J.D. emails, when I look at the Inbox, I can quickly focus on the messages that matter the most to me, such as a reader sending in a suggestion with a news story for my Friday In the News post or interactions with someone who matters to me. From time to time, I look at the other folders used by SaneBox, and I can quickly deal with those emails, but they are virtually always the emails that don’t really matter to me. For my Gmail account, SaneBox has been a incredibly valuable. I use Gmail when I make purchases from websites, stores, services, etc., and as a result, there is so much in there that I don’t really care about. But I don’t want to miss my Gmail emails that do matter. Before I started using SaneBox, I would open up Gmail and see over a hundred messages, most of which didn’t really matter to me. Now, I often see less than 10 messages in my Inbox. Every few days, I’ll take the time to look at the folders used by SaneBox, and I can easily read things that I want to see or quickly delete all of them that I don’t care about. It has made a huge difference in my life, and it saves me so much time.

If you want to try out SaneBox to see what a huge difference it can make in your life, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you don’t like having a clean and tidy Inbox and decide to return back to how you had it before, no sweat. But if you appreciate having a better way of working with email, using this link in this post will give you a generous $25 credit for when you pick a plan—and there are lots of different plans offered so that you can choose the one that gives you just what you want.

Thanks again to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month and for giving all of us a more efficient way to work with email.

The iconic Apple Store cube on Fifth Avenue in New York is covered with an interesting structure. It makes sense that this is a temporary structure erected to renovate the glass on the cube, but based on the picture that Brett Burney took in New York this week, it doesn’t look like any ordinary temporary structure. We begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast discussing the cube. We then discuss our plans for ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago next week, what we expect to see announced in iOS 19 in two months and what we expect to see available in iOS 18.4 perhaps as soon as next week. We also discuss the original and latest versions of the AirFly from Twelve South, music updates, and the latest news relating to Apple TV+. We also discuss the great behind-the-scenes video associated with the Spike Jonze commercial for AirPods noise cancellation called Someday.

In our In the Know segment, I preview my upcoming ABA TECHSHOW presentation on iPhone and iPad tips by sharing some tips that are definitely both oldies and goodies.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Apple announced this week that its developer conference, WWDC, will take place June 9 through June 13, 2025. For those of us who are not developers, WWDC is significant because it is when Apple always previews the next versions of its operating systems, which are typically released in the Fall. What will be included in iOS 19? Only Apple knows for sure right now, but Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac notes that two people with a reputation for leaking unannounced Apple products—Mark Gurman of Bloomberg and Jon Prosser of FrontPageTech—say that we will see a new user interface for the iPhone and other devices, although the two of them disagree somewhat on what it will look like. I remember the major iPhone user interface change in iOS 7, which Apple first previewed at WWDC 2013, and the change was controversial at the time, although as Apple tweaked the design and users became more comfortable with it over time, I now look back on it as a change that was for the better. Perhaps we will see similar growing pains later this year when iOS 19 is released. Jason Snell of Six Colors also offers some interesting thoughts on what we may see announced at WWDC 2025. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• This is a busy time of year in the world of legal technology. First, Legalweek New York 2025 wrapped up yesterday. My podcast co-host Brett Burney was in New York for the conference, and he noticed that the iconic Apple Store on Fifth Avenue looks different. There is now a structure over the cube. I’m not sure if this is intended to be a permanent change, but it dramatically changes the look of the store. Here is a picture that Brett took on March 26, 2025:

For comparison, here is what the cube looked like when it first opened on May 19, 2006. You can see me standing in line wearing the red shirt:

• Second, another big legal technology conference, ABA TECHSHOW 2025, will take place next week in Chicago. Brett and I will both be there. The spots for the Taste of TECHSHOW dinner that Brett and I will host disappeared only minutes after the ABA started taking reservations. For those of you who did get a spot, I know that it will be a lot of fun. For those of you who are attending TECHSHOW and did not get a spot, you can still sign up for the waiting list, and there will be lots of other opportunities for everyone at TECHSHOW to interact. Brett and I are going to try to record an episode of the In the News podcast on Friday, April 4. I don’t yet know where we will record it or if there will be an opportunity for folks to join us while we do so.
• You can currently get the new Apple Watch Series 10 on Amazon for an all-time low price of $299, which is a huge 25% discount. That’s the smaller model with the 42mm case, but that same link will get you the 46mm case model at 23% off, only $329. I love my Apple Watch Series 10 and I even prefer it to the more expensive Apple Watch Ultra 2, for the reasons I explained in this review.
• Next month, Apple will release iOS 18.4 and similar updates for other products. Juli Clover reports on the top five new features coming to iOS 18.4.
• Kanika Gogia of the Mac Observer reports on some of the less prominent new features coming in iOS 18.4
• Clover reports that one change coming to watchOS 11.4 is the option for an Apple Watch alarm to “Break Through”—i.e., make noise—even when your watch is in Silent Mode. I actually like the way that an Apple Watch can wake me up by tapping my wrist and not making a sound, but for a morning when you fear that you may have trouble waking up and you don’t need to worry about annoying someone else in the same room by making noise, this feature seems very useful.
• Lando Loic extolls the virtues of using Apple’s built-in productivity apps instead of third-party alternatives. His post focuses on the Mac versions of these apps, but I think that the same logic applies to the iPhone and iPad apps.
• In 2018, I reviewed a product from Twelve South called AirFly that added Bluetooth to any headphone jack—such as the one that is part of an in-flight entertainment system on an airplane or the audio in a health club—so that you could listen using your AirPods. I’ll always remember writing that review because it was the day the music died—on my iPod, at least. (Read the end of that post for the bittersweet tale.) Twelve South has come out with newer versions of the AirFly since 2018, and Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the brand new AirFly Pro 2, which offers better sound, better controls, and can connect to two pairs of headphones at once. It is $59.99 on Amazon.
• Speaking of music, Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac reports that Apple added three new features to the Apple Music Classical app.
• Speaking of music, Jason Snell of Six Colors reports on a small update to the AirPods Max.
• Apple TV+ has a reputation for releasing fantastic TV series, but it hasn’t released many movies. There is a big one coming to theaters this summer called F1 starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski. (Apple released a trailer earlier this month.) Borys Kit of the Hollywood Reporter says that Apple is so happy with how that movie is coming along that it also signed a deal with Kosinski to direct and produce another movie about UFOs, and the famous producer Jerry Bruckheimer is involved as well. That sounds like it could be a great movie.
• A new series debuts on Apple TV+ this week called The Studio. It was created by and stars Seth Rogen, it also stars the treat Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn, and it has more cameos than you can shake a stick at. And the early reviews for it are fantastic. Dana Stevens of Slate calls it the best new comedy of 2025.
• I haven’t watched the first episode of The Studio yet, but I did enjoy reading the extensive article by Ethan Shanfeld in Variety about the making of the series.
• Last week, I ended my In the News post with the impressive Spike Jonze commercial for AirPods noise cancellation called Someday. Here is a new video on the making of that commercial. As much as I enjoyed the original video, the behind-the-scenes video is perhaps even more interesting. It also shows that a lot of the parts that I thought could be CGI were, in fact, practical effects.
• And finally, John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that if you go to the Apple website right now and you click on the word Mac at the top of the page, you will see a list of all of the computers that Apple sells … along with a listing for a computer not sold by Apple, but another company that you may have heard of: Lumon. Yes, that Lumon. It is a fun promotion for the incredible Apple TV+ show Severance, which just finished its second season. Apple also released this fun video that shows how Macs were used to edit the show, but DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO until after you have watched the final episode of Season 2 because this video goes behind the scenes on the surprising parts of that season finale:

Next week, I’ll be speaking at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago, which takes place April 2-5 at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. That’s a new location for this conference, but the conference itself is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. And I’m celebrating my 10th year speaking at the conference—my first presentation was in 2008, and my most recent presentation was in 2019. I’m really looking forward to being back this year because I always learn so much and meet so many great people at TECHSHOW.

I’m presenting two sessions. First, on April 3, at 2:15 pm, I’m presenting a session called Practicing Law in an Augmented Reality. Perhaps a better name for that session is the Apple Vision Pro Hour. My co-presenter is Prof. Kenton Brice of the University of Oklahoma College of Law. If you own a Vision Pro, we will share lots of tips for getting the most out of that device in your law practice. But if you don’t own one, we will explain why you are likely to own something similar in the future, and this session will explore the role of this new type of device in the legal setting. The Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device—even if, like the first iPhone, the first personal computer, the first tablet computer, etc., it is likely to change quite a bit in the future. If you want to get a preview of the future of legal technology, you should attend. This session is going to be incredibly fun.

Second, on April 4, at 2:45 pm, I’m presenting a session called Maximizing Your Productivity with an iPad and iPhone. My goal in this session is to try to tell you almost everything I know about how to do more with your iPad and iPhone. Apps, services, tips, and more, I will try to cover it all in this jam-packed session.

Like in previous years, there is also a Taste of Techshow where you can sign up for a group dinner. On Thursday, April 3, at 7 pm, Brett Burney and I will present the dinner version of our In the News podcast. Officially, our topic listing is iPhone, iPad, iFun! These dinners always fill up incredibly fast, so if you want to join us, do so as soon as possible before it is too late. [UPDATE 3/27/2025: Dinner sign-ups went live today, and only a few minutes later, our dinner hit capacity. But you can still sign up for a waiting list, so if someone else changes their plans, you might still have an opportunity to join us.]

If you see me in Chicago next week, please don’t be shy. Stop me and say hello! I’d love to meet you and talk technology with you.

I’ll end this post with a picture of me and Brett Burney from ten years ago at ABA TECHSHOW 2015. It’s amazing how we haven’t aged a day since then.

 

We begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast with a discussion of the latest news relating to Siri: a new example of it not working as expected and why we now have new hope that it will improve in the future. Next, we discuss the state of the art in streaming video devices and why an Apple TV is still your best bet. We also discuss improvements to Maps and Messages, my review of the fantastic Anker Laptop Power Bank (and the news that you can once again get it on Amazon for under $100, the end of the current season of Severance and the confirmation of a new season of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, confirmation that Texas attorney Rod Ponton is still not a cat, and Apple’s latest video for the AirPods Pro.

In our In the Know segment, Brett describes “Safe Driving Mode” in the Zoom app on iPhone, and I explain why the built-in Compass App on the iPhone and Apple Watch is more useful than you might think.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

 

I have been using an Apple TV since the first model was released in early 2007. That doesn’t just predate the launch of this website in 2008; it predates the iPhone. I’ve upgraded to different models over the years and have been using the Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) since 2021. As a result, I haven’t paid close attention to the competition in a long time. Thus, I was curious to read the comparison of the latest TV streaming devices by Jason Snell of Six Colors. Even though the current generation Apple TV hardware hasn’t been updated in four years, Snell explains that it is still the best of the pack. One huge advantage is the lack of ads, which he notes are especially obnoxious with the Fire TV. (Snell writes: “I wouldn’t use the Fire TV if Amazon gave me one for free, and given the amount of advertising on the box, they should be paying people to use them.”) But Snell also identifies some software features used by other devices that he thinks Apple should implement, such as listing streaming live TV channels. If you use an Apple TV like I do, this is an interesting article that helps you to appreciate what is good about what you already have while also showing how others have taken some interesting different approaches. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Last week, I discussed Apple’s acknowledgment that it was behind in AI, and Siri got even more bad press this week when folks realized that Siri doesn’t even know what month it is, as noted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. But maybe there is hope in the future. Gruber also discusses a report by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg that Apple is changing its AI leadership, replacing John Giannandrea (formerly of Google) with Mike Rockwell (who had been in charge of the Apple Vision Pro). It will be a while before we see the impact of this change, but hopefully, the change will pay dividends for us users.
• Esther Fung of the Wall Street Journal reports that 13 people were arrested in an international crime ring targeting FedEx deliveries of iPhones and other Apple products. An AT&T store employee was bribed to leak order details, and theives would track the deliveries and then pick up packages from doorsteps immediately after items were delivered.
• If you want a new watch band for your Apple Watch at a huge discount, Woot is once again selling Apple Watch bands at an extreme discount: Apple Solo Loops for $20 and Apple Braided Solo Loops for $30. I took advantage of a similar sale in the past. These are original Apple products from prior seasons, and I loved gaining two new Solo Loop colors for only $40.
• Ryan Christoffel explains one of his favorite improvements to Apple Maps in iOS 18: the ability to search for places in a specific area that you are viewing on the map.
• Christoffel also discusses a recent study of Apple’s new C1 modem in the iPhone 16e by Ookla—maker of the popular Speedtest app—and the conclusions are quite promissing. Qualcomm modems can outperform the C1 when the network connection is good, but when you have a good connection, you are less likely to notice slight improvements. What really matters more is how the modems perform when the network performance is poor, and Apple’s C1 modem beat Qualcomm’s modems in those tests. Considering that this is Apple’s first effort, these findings make me think that future C2, C3, etc. modems from Apple could be quite impressive.
• Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the PNY Pro Elite V3, a flash drive with a huge capacity, including a 2TB version fo $145 on Amazon. That’s a ton of storage in a very small package. I could see it being useful with an iPad if you want to carry around a ton of files that won’t fit on your internal storage.
• If you don’t use a password manager, you should. The one that I use and highly recommend is 1Password, which is especially useful if you get 1Password for Families so that you can easily share certain passwords and other important information with others. Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors reports that 1Password Families is currently 50% off (and the individual version is 25% off).
• I heard from a lot of you who purchased an Anker Laptop Power Bank after reading my review earlier this week. That device is fantastic, and I highly recommend it. After I first published that post, Anker (or Amazon?) added a coupon so that you can get it for about $100 on Amazon. If you ever have a need for portable power when you lack convenient access to an outlet, you should check it out. Of course, Anker makes many other products too, and Eric Slivka of MacRumors reviews some other new interesting charging accessories from Anker.
• Joe Rossignol of MacRumors identifies the nine states, plus Puerto Rico, where you can currently add a driver’s license to the iPhone’s Wallet app and identifies eight more states that are working to add this feature: Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Oklahoma.
• When iOS 19 comes out later this year, Apple will add support for new RCS features that will improve your text messaging experience with Android users in five ways, as explained by Joe Rossignol of MacRumors.
• Who is that actor, and what else were they in? Callsheet is a great app from Casey Liss that can answer those types of questions. Devon Dundee discusses an update to that app that allows you to create multiple pinned item lists.
• Speaking of TV, I stayed up late last night to watch the Season 2 finale of Severance. No spoilers, but OMG it is so good! An incredible episode of television. The only thing I don’t like is that now I’ll have to wait until Season 3 to get more. Fortunately, Armando Tinoco of Deadline reports that we won’t have to wait as long for Season 3 as we did for Season 2.
• If you are a fan of Severance, do a Google search for the word “Severance” and then tap the blue button at the bottom. And feel free to keep tapping it repeatedly. Nicely done, Google!
• Speaking of great shows on Apple TV+, Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that Season 4 of Ted Lasso is confirmed and will feature Lasso coaching a women’s team.
• Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors reports that you can currently get a bundle of Disney+ and Hulu (both with ads, unfortunately) for only $2.99/month for four months. I’m currently watching Paradise on Hulu, and it is really good.
• The very best content for the Apple Vision Pro comes from Apple: the almost two dozen Apple Immersive Videos that I identified in this post (a post that I continue to update as new content is released and announced). But third parties are also doing interesting things with immersive video, and the very best one right now is the Prima Immersive app, which premiered on February 10, 2025, with the first episode of the Sessions immersive video series from The Spatialists, featuring bluegrass band AJ Lee & Blue Summit. Tim Chaten of the Vision Pros podcast interviewed Tom Rettig, the founder and Executive Producer of The Spacialists, in the latest episode of the Vision Pros podcast. I thought it was a fascinating interview, and it provides some great insight into additional great third-party content that we should see in 2025 and beyond.
• One of the funniest viral videos that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic featured Texas attorney Rod “I’m not a cat” Ponton. Claire Moses of the New York Times caught up with Ponton to discuss it, and he has a great sense of humor about the incident. That video still brings a smile to my face when I watch it.
• And finally, for a very long time, Apple has released ads for the iPod and iPhone featuring people listening to music as they walk down the street. But the one that Apple released this week called Someday is particularly impressive. It was created by Spike Jonze, it stars Pedro Pascal, and it is a feast for the eyes: