Are Apple Macs now the right choice for legal businesses and law firms?
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Every time I wander into a Starbucks in London, I can’t help noticing the vast majority of laptops being used by customers are Apple Macbooks of one form or another. In the last Starbucks I went into, everyone was using them. Is there some sort of subliminal advertising going on there? If there is, it's probably worked on me - I bought a Macbook Pro recently, despite being vaguely anti-Mac in the past.
Truth is, Apple is like a creeping virus. First I bought an iPad, now a Macbook. And, as a chum pointed out, I own an iPod. So I am slowly being technologically suffocated by Apple.
It's not all bad. Really, a Macbook pro is no different in its guts to a Windows laptop. Same processor, memory, drives etc. And you can run Windows on it – either via Boot Camp or in a virtual mode using a product like Parallels. So you can operate Macs for whatever software you like.
And, If you think they might be expensive, as originally I did, you need to take a closer look. To get the kind of build quality a Mac offers, you have to buy at the upper end of another manufacturers' ranges. Once you start to price them up, there’s little difference - and you don’t even have to stump up £100 for Outlook, as Mac has its own mail, calendar and contacts clients. For those of you as old as I am, you will remember Outlook being a freebie for a long time. Funny how long it took Microsoft to work out that it was as valuable as any other of its desktop products.
Are Macs any good? Yes and no. If you migrate from Windows, getting used to it takes a bit of time. And things like file saving and diagnostics are 'Apple-ised' and, in my humble opinion, not that good. The email client also has quirks that are just plain unhelpful. If you ever wondered how good Outlook really is, try GoogleMail and then the Apple client. You will be queuing up to pay Microsoft their £100 blood money soon enough.
In terms of antivirus, there are products for Mac, but Apple maintains virus writers don’t target them. That will all change in time, and they need to be a little less smug about it. Still for now, it's fairly trouble-free. What isn’t trouble-free is my Windows PC - not through virus attacks, but as a result of my antivirus product taking as much power as the machine can give to do its thing. When you read online blogs on antivirus performance, it's clear that many people suffer slow machines as a result of this software. You get to the point where you wonder what the definition of a virus is something that hampers your performance perhaps? Many years ago, a colleague of mine (a head gardener by trade) answered my question of how to define a weed thus: "It's anything you don’t want in your garden."
If you transfer that thinking to antivirus software, you too might end up buying a Mac for that reason alone...
Are Macs right for law firm or legal business use? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
With the proliferation of cloud-based services, we're becoming a more device-agnostic society as a whole. I see 2 factors that prohibit businesses moving to an Apple environment: Firstly, support for the equipment/software - most support personnel are well-versed in Windows, less so in Apple products. Secondly, a lot of software is tied into Windows authentication or only works on Windows.
There is little point in purchasing an Apple product only to then run Windows software through a virtual machine, particularly when virus protection etc. can be done at an enterprise level.
With law firms being as risk adverse as they are, will be interesting to see if Macs could ever catch on internally. I should imagine Macs becoming standard unlikely, mainly due to the fact that as time progresses, virus creators are increasingly targeting Mac hardware. The longer law firm IT departments procrastinate the less the argument of Macs having superior security will stand.
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