The Legal Mac section of the March 2009 Law Practice Today features the article "Apple Refreshes Product Line for Spring" by Ben Stevens.
Macs are continuing to gain popularity with attorneys. As Spring approaches, Apple is refreshing many of its popular items and therefore increasing the options for lawyers who want to climb aboard the Mac bandwagon.
The number of Mac-using attorneys continues to increase along with the number of Mac users overall. Based on the number of glowing Apples in the audience at the various sessions at ABA TECHSHOW last year, I am looking forward to the turnout this year, particularly in light of the exciting Mac-related sessions (Got Apple Envy? Macs in a PC World, Mac@Trial , and Is that an iPhone in Your Pocket?).
If you don’t already have a Mac, there’s still time to pick one up before ABA TECHSHOW. What’s even better is that earlier this month, Apple announced updates to its Mac desktop models, as follows:
- iMac :: The beautiful and functional iMac now offers twice the memory and twice the storage. The 24-inch iMac is priced at just $1,499 — the same price as the previous generation’s 20-inch model, which is now only $1,199. Both models exceed the current Energy Star requirements as well as the ones which will become effective later this year.
- Mac Mini :: This generation of Apple’s smallest desktop still measures 6.5 inches by 6.5 inches by 2 inches, but it now offers up to twice as much memory as the previous generation as well as up to 5x faster graphics performance with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor. Apple reports that the new Mini uses less than 13 watts of power when idle, which it claims is 10 times less power than a typical desktop PC.
- Mac Pro :: This ultra-powerful desktop now features the Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor, which now provides speeds up to 1.9x faster than the previous generation. Another new feature is Turbo Boost, a dynamic performance technology that automatically boosts the processor clock speed based on workload.
This new price scheme is wonderful. For a desktop PC with DDR3 RAM, you can’t beat an iMac. A common complaint I hear from Windows users is that OS X is “too user friendly” or “doesn’t allow for as much control” as Windows or Linux. Most of these same people also forget that OS X is a Unix based operating system with a command-line interface. I would wager that experienced users could do “more” with OS X than Windows. PCs definitely have a leg up on expandability though.