If you trained on Eclipse or Case CATalyst, you’d recognize today’s version on sight. Same core layout, same workflow, same muscle memory. That continuity feels like stability. It’s also the problem.

Here’s a small detail that says a lot: the Mac is barely supported in the court reporting world, yet it’s the machine half the attorneys you work with live on. Counsel takes the deposition on a MacBook, marks up the PDF on an iPad, and reads the realtime feed in Safari — and then the record they’re depending on is produced on software that, in 2026, still effectively requires Windows. The people buying the transcript moved to the Mac years ago. The people making it never got the option.

For two decades, CAT software has been a duopoly. Eclipse (Advantage Software) and Case CATalyst (Stenograph) have been “good enough” long enough that neither has had a real reason to rethink the fundamentals. When two products own a profession and every customer is anchored by a personal dictionary they’ve spent a career building, the pressure to improve quietly disappears.

What’s actually stagnated

The interfaces belong to an earlier era of Windows. There’s effectively no Mac in the field at all — not because reporters wouldn’t use one, but because the software won’t run on it, so the handful who try end up booting Windows inside a virtual machine. Licensing is per-seat with annual maintenance you essentially re-buy to stay current. Realtime is stable — credit where it’s due — but everything around it is frozen: scheduling, exhibits, invoicing, and reporter payouts live in entirely separate tools, if they’re tools at all. Cloud and collaboration are afterthoughts bolted onto desktop software.

What reporters work around every day

You export an ASCII so another program can do the thing your CAT software won’t. You keep your calendar in one app, your invoices in a spreadsheet, your transcripts in a repository portal, and your exhibits in a folder named after the case. You build the same briefs by hand again. You wait on support. None of this is the record — it’s the tax you pay to produce the record.

Why it’s structural, not laziness

The people inside these companies aren’t the issue. The market is. Duopoly plus dictionary lock-in plus a steep learning curve produces switching costs so high the market can’t discipline the vendors. Reporters don’t move, because moving your dictionary and re-learning your tool mid-career is brutal. Because reporters don’t move, vendors don’t have to change. The lock-in isn’t a side effect — it’s the business model.

What that costs you

Hours on admin instead of pages. Money on tools that don’t talk to each other. And a quieter cost: every year, the gap widens between how reporters work and how modern professionals expect to work — which doesn’t help a profession already fighting a shortage and an image problem.

We’re building DepoStack on the opposite premise: your data is yours and portable, and pricing is on a webpage. And the Mac question is one we want to answer in a big way — no one should have to run a virtual machine just to do their job, so supporting Windows, Mac, and web (depending on the app or service) is exactly the kind of thing we intend to take seriously rather than treat as an afterthought. When leaving is easy, a vendor has to earn you every single year. That’s the version of this market reporters deserve. Join the founding-member waitlist.