Considering buying a Mac, all new to me

Pros

• Integration with the Apple ecosystem, iMessage, FaceTime, etc
• With a Magic Trackpad, you can use many of the same VoiceOver gestures you're used to on iOS
• Ability to create separate user profiles for you and your husband
• Ability to create Windows virtual machine

Cons

• Potentially steep learning curve for someone coming from Windows
• Microsoft Office difficult to use on macOS

HTH

Hello, I didn’t hear comments like this one from other users three years ago when I bought my first MacBook Air. No I is a result I use windows with the Boot Camp partition, because it’s macOS is beautiful with Safari, Microsoft office which means the 90% of the programs I use for my job, is a nightmare with voiceover, it is not as descriptive using formats as JAWS is with windows.
Also if you use a lot of PDF documents they are not accessible with voiceover, so now I have a beautiful MacBook Air 2019 which I rarely use in MacOS for my job and instead I use it a lot with windows

Hi Catherin
I'm a mac user and I love it. You can set up windows by installing Bootcamp. I've used this a few years ago, however had some issues when I wanted to switch back to IOS. When you are not in windows, you can use Pages to create and edit Microsoft documents. You can also export a pages document into a Microsoft document. Also, Sheets works like Excell. If you would like to run windows, you can install Jaws if you want to however there will be different keyboard shortcuts, however you can download and install word and Excell.. You can create as many user profiles as you want, and all information in each user profile will be separate.
I hope this answers your questions. Let me know if it doesn't.
I'll try BootCamp today, and see how I go switching between IOS and windows.

Currently, on Macs with Apple Silicon, which are the majority of Macs soled today, dual booting via BootCamp isn't supported. If you want to run Windows on a Mac with Apple Silicon, the only way to do so currently is to use something like UTM to install Windows in a virtual machine.

Someone once told me that to convert a pages document to Microsoft Word extension was a nightmare, is it still that way?
My thing with macOS is regarding formatting documents in a professional way it’s not that descriptive as in windows, when I try to select word by word in Microsoft word voiceover doesn’t read a thing so I don’t know what the heck I am selecting, The same thing happens when I try to select paragraphs or when I activate or deactivate bold letters, voiceover does not says anything
How do you cope with that situation?

I'm not exactly sure how much formatting is preserved when converting Pages documents to Word, but the process itself is easy. For me, I do all my writing and formatting in Pages, where VoiceOver formatting descriptions in that app are sufficient for my use case, and if I need to, for example, email it to someone using Word, I simply choose Share > send a copy > Mail, and choose "Word" in the resulting dialog. The document is then sent in Word format, however if someone using Word sends it back, any changes I make will cause it to be saved locally as a new Pages file.

HTH

I would recommend buying a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, or whatever you need for your purposes). In my experience (with a 14-inch MacBook Pro, M1 Pro processor), the performance is very impressive.

For a desktop system, and I may be mistaken here, your choices are a Mac mini or iMac with an M1 processor, or the Mac Studio with M1 Max or M1 Ultra. Based on reviews that I've read, the M1 should be sufficient for typical desktop tasks such as e-mail, listening to music, and word processing. If you're planning to do serious audio editing or software development, then there's a good reason to choose one of the better chips (such as the M1 Pro or M1 Max).

Why not get a Windows PC for Microsoft Office usage and any other productivity tasks? You can still use the iPad and iPhone for facetime. Windows 10 and Windows 11 allow you to have separate user accounts on the same machine. I set up my own account on my Wife's laptop until I replaced mine that broke and had no issues keeping our stuff separate.