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Starting your own practice? My advice is don't make the Apple store your first stop..


When we set out on our own, I suspect that in our minds eye our days are spent sipping Lattes in beautiful locations, finally able to genuinely "work from anywhere".


And within that mental picture we have drawn, inevitably we will be sat at the graceful keyboard of an Apple Mac, its clean crisp logo illuminating the back of our screens, finally able to join the cool crew and use the machine we always wanted but that the IT team would not give us.


There was of course a good reason for that, Microsoft dominate the business desktop, their applications are excellent for the business user and moreover, all the add on solutions that you will want to use, will integrate better with Microsoft than other platforms. Of course they do, its a weight of numbers issue.


Additionally, while we are largely moving to the cloud, many outstanding applications have a desktop install, and there are benefits to doing this. The server side technology should absolutely live in the cloud, that's where it belongs, but local client installs can often (not always) provide a richer functional experience.


This is played out with Microsoft themselves, the Microsoft 365 platform is awesome, it can run in a browser or via a local install. I've tried both and I'll take the local install every time.


Of course, software companies don't usually spend time developing a local client install for the Apple platform, why would they?, almost no law firms operate a Mac based environment so there is little return on that investment.


Over the fullness of time, inevitably almost all software will be entirely browser or app based and as such platform agnostic, but until that time, as I myself found out (so I'm speaking from experience here), a Mac Book is to all intent and purpose, the worlds most expensive Chrome Book.


Oh, and in case you are wondering, if you crack the screen, that's a £700 repair bill...... You might have guessed, I'm back on Windows now and its awesome!


Oh, and if you are looking to start up your own practice, we can actually help with that and signpost the right technology and technical assistance to get you off to a flyer. https://www.hindsightlegal.com/startup-law-firms


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