If someone asked you to show me why mac is amazing, what would you do/show them?

MacOS VoiceOver isn't awful, but could definitely do with some improvements.

I would show you the image description feature. It works similarly to how it does on the iPhone, but I still think it's a cool feature. I also think it's possible to do Live Text on the Mac but I'll have to double check that.

GarageBand is really cool too, just fun to play around with.

I also like the built-in Podcasts appp.

Disclaimer: I use both macOS and Windows OS. I find enjoyment in both systems.

I will list some perks I find wonderful within the macOS system. Some of these will seem trivial. Some will seem wonderful. You can decide what you think on your own.
1. Unix. This is more for the programmer/power user but as I am an advanced user, I feel it bares mentioning. The Unix system is extremely efficient and very intuitive. Couple this with the macOS GUI, and you have a user friendly interface that is easy to learn and due to its streamlined design, you spend less time with system hangups and more time getting things done.

2. Continuity. The ability to handoff your work between one Apple device and another Apple device can be a complete life saver. i.e. Reading a post on AppleVis on my iPhone, and then jumping on my MBP so that I can chat with a friend on the phone while I continue perusing the forums on said websire. Priceless.

3. Hotkey shortcuts. No I am not referring to the Shortcuts app. macOS has just about the entire system preset to a keyboard hotkey. I realize you can do this, too, in Windows. However, "you" have to set that up. MacOS has it already setup for you. Want to open Documents? There is a hotkey for that. Downloads? Hotkey for that too. How about your Applications folder? User folder? Network? Storage such as Harddrives, thumbdrives, etc? Hotkeys for everyone!

4. Terminal. Again, another programmer/power user goody. The Terminal is "powerful". You can do things like barch scripting and organization. Coding. You can even open Applications and Web pages using Terminal. Of course you can do so much more with Terminal, but those are a couple highlights.

5. Apple Script. Being able to script your OS to do a number of things such as automated functions, including batch functions, can be done with Apple Script.

6. iWork. People are going to baulk at this one, but hey know of any other OS than comes with free commercially licensed office applications?

7. Accessibility. Bugs aside, because everybody is going to say something here -- Apple is unmatched in the Accessibility arena. Bar none. Oh, and look, you can pay $1,000+ for assistive software, to go with your computer, or you can spend $1,000+ to buy a computer with built-in assistive software.

8. iCloud Drive. I have used Dropbox and One Drive, and they are ok, but like with the iWork suite, it is part of the macOS eco system, and is free.

9. Image conversion. I am unaware if this is a thing in Windows, but you can convert images natively in macOS. 'nuff said.

10. Facetime. I know there is Zoom. I know of MS Teams. And Skype. Nevertheless Facetime is built-in to Apple's eco system. Not only can you both video and audio call people, even a ton of people. You can take and share photos with said people, share screens, even share music and video, in real time. Not to mention the Live Caption function recently introduced that gives inclusion to Deaf users.

I'm sure others will have more things to add, and likely better 'perks' than I. Still, these are a few of the many things I love about Apple.

Yes, as I said on another thread. I've wondered about the benefits of a Mac over Windows for years. I know about Time Machine for example, the ability to back up your entire system. Windows doesn't seem to have anything like that. I mean there is system restore, but that only takes your system back to a certain point, and from Windows 10 onwards, it seems you have to always remember to create your own restore points, it doesn't create them automatically for you. What about bios stuff on the mac and safe mode? I know it's harder to get viruses on the Mac. But my real questions are about word processing with programs like iWorks, Scrivener, Ulysses, and Pages. How easy is it to review, accept and reject track changes? What about announcing whether text is in bold or italics for example? What about getting imformation about text such as foreground, background and highlight colours? What about navigating textboxes? What about the announcement of column and row headers in tables? What happens when text is laid out in columns and sections? In Windows I just copy everything over to notepad if things are that bad, and I can usually read stuff that way when it comes to columns and text divided up into different sections. How easy is it to insert and read comments, footnotes and endnotes? What about the ability to read line numbers in a document? What about being able to search for text in a certain colour easily? JAWS has this feature but it wasn't at all efficient the last time I tried to use it. Nowadays, Narrator announces text atributes better than JAWS and NVDA. What about reading PDF documents? In Windows there are several options out there for this. What about anotating PDF documents (marking text with strikethrough etc.), with something like Adobe? You can't do this in Windows at all. Adobe professional isn't accessible when it comes to editing and anotating documents. I appreciate my questions might be a bit technical, but I studied translation years ago and looked into and did some proofreading work a while back and these issues crop up again and again for me in Windows. Things are getting easier now with Narrator automatically reading atributes more efficiently, and maybe I could even put stuff through Be My AI if there is ever some sort of offline mode one day if I need text atributes described. My boyfriend uses a mac a lot for music and sound stuff, but when I asked him all these questions about word processing, he had no idea. It just goes to show there can be so many use-cases for someone using a computer.

Windows losing speech is the exact equivelent of a monitor turning off randomly. It means the PC might as well have switched itself off. No speech is something all screen readers should get right from day 1 and never let slip. Mac does this perfectly. I don’t think I ever had a time when VO stopped talking on my Mac but there were so many other problems that Macs had to go for me.

VO can be verbose. It helps to completely disable everything in the VO utility under Verbosity > Hints. There are also quite a few things within Verbosity > Announcements that most experienced users could do without.

Natively, NVDA has a basic OCR by pressing NVDA + "r". However, there are a number of OCR add-ons that blow anything else, on any other system, out of the stratosphere. Add-ons like Nau and Cloud Vision, to name a couple.

I personally always liked VOs sound effects for navigating and interacting with various elements onscreen. Thankfully NVDA has an add-on for this functionality too. You can even choose to have your sound theme be that of macOS. 😇

Brad, the NVDA add on for image descriptions is called Cloud Vision. I've downloaded it but haven't tried it out yet.

Ever since Microsoft came out with version 2 of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) Unix is no longer an advantage for the Mac. I've used WSl for back-end development on teams with mac users. As long There was no difference between what I could do compared to people using the Mac.

Brad,

You might wanna give this a look-see too. It is pretty amazing for what it is. 😀

I may be remembering wrong, but didn't the older versions of iOS actually speak aloud when the screen locked? I'm referring to iOS from maybe version 9 or earlier.

My first iPhone was an iPhone 4S. You remember those? Where Siri was introduced to iOS.
We're talking iOS 5.x.
Native YouTube app, Google Maps rather than Apple Maps, because Apple Maps did not exist yet.
Oh! And Siri could not even give sports scores.

Not to mention VO ran near flawlessly.

Can we go back to that for iOS? 😏

Never play well with screen readers.
Ever.
The spacebar could be an add-on conflict, or just NVDA. Or your computer. Or your keyboard configuration. Or the planetary alignment. Or the fact that Halloween is coming up.
Try this, press NVDA + "q". You should get a shutdown menu. Arrow down ntil you hear, "Restart without add-ons enabled".
Then go back to YouTube, and see how it goes.

I don't use macOS anymore because of all the VoiceOver problems that could be easily fixed with correct prioritization. However, macOS is a great system and I'm truly sad VoiceOver lets it down. VoiceOver also has the potential to be powerful and streamlined, if only it was given the attention it deserves. However, I digress. Let's go!

macOS has a talking clock that can be configured to announce the time at different intervals such as every 15 minutes or hourly. There's a talking calculator that can speak both the keys you type, as well as the results of calculations if you enable the respective settings. Disk Utility is an amazing program for managing disks, and I wish I could find something comparable on Windows.
You used to be able to backup the entire system with Time Machine. It got even better with third-party tools like SuperDuper, because these would allow you to create a bootable backup on an external drive. You could boot the computer from this drive and either use it like that, or restore the cloned system back to the internal drive if you needed to. I'm not sure if this works anymore. Time Machine doesn't backup the entire system in Big Sur and later. It has something to do with the sealed system volume and System Integrity Protection features as far as I can tell. Now, Time Machine only backs up user data and third-party applications, not the entire system.
System Integrity Protection is a feature designed to prevent programs from modifying core system files. This got even better in Catalina and newer. You can of course disable all these protections if you want, but this is great for less technical people. It means the system will be much harder to screw up. This is why I'm starting to think the best computers for less techy people are modern Macs and ChromeOS devices. They just work and you don't have to worry about accidentally breaking core functionality unless you really know what you're doing.
You can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu item in any application. As you can imagine, this can be very powerful.

You can still do this with an external drive, so long as the drive has sufficient storage and is formatted the same file system as your active install of macOS. I do not rmember the details, but the bootable thumb drive is achieveable via Terminal.

I did not know about the Time Machine thing. That kinda blows...

Agree that macOS and ChromeOS are better for those with limited computer skill and/or experience.

Gatekeeper is another great feature that goes hand in hand with System Integrity Protection. By default, the system will only run applications from the App Store or those that have been signed by an identified developer. For less technical users, this is wonderful!
macOS has had and still has a fully accessible recovery environment and installer. It has had this since 2005, and it was! a! BFD at the time! Windows 10 and later includes this functionality using Narrator, but it's really sad it took Microsoft until 2017 to get it right. As far as I know, you can't access traditional BIOS or UEFI settings on a Mac. However, I've been told the new Apple Silicon Macs have a talking boot menu that allows you to run macOS Recovery or choose a drive to boot from. No other computer has this, including the Intel Macs.

Life would be perfect. Well, not really, but hey, a man can dream.

BootCamp on Apple Silicon would be amazing! I'm sure Windows would be amazingly fast! The problem is neither Microsoft nor Apple are interested in writing drivers. I might consider buying a Mac and turning it into a really nice PC if this happens!
I installed Windows 11 on my 2013 MacBook Air, replacing macOS entirely. The machine is amazing and runs even better than it did with macOS! It's embarrassing that an officially unsupported operating system from a major competitor runs better than official software!

@Chris,

I have said this before, that my current MBP runs Windows 10 far better than it runs macOS. Sad, but true.

@singer girl,

You can, but it requires technical know-how. There is such a thing as "Hackintosh. I will leave it to you to find some info on YouTube and Google, as I do not want to anger the overlords of AppleVis. 😇

Brian saved me a lot of typing because I would have listed a lot of those. AirDrop is wonderful. I can rapidly and easily transfer files to and from my Mac.

This is kind of silly, but I always thought it was cool how you can hold up a piece of paper with your signature and add that to a PDF.

https://www.theverge.com/22321383/signature-pdf-mac-pdf-how-to-preview

One thing I would add to this, that I have found almost impossible on Windows is drag and drop. I actually had to use this today. I use a platform for my online radio station that runs out of the cloud, and thus I don't have to have a computer running all the time here at home. I can have the same computer in studio as I do when traveling, which for the longest time would not have been possible. Anyway, this platform lets you create playlists based on tracks from certain folders, so I can add music, sweepers, ads, anything I want, in the order I want. It's a lot more advanced than a lot of other stuff out there. I say all that, because I added an item to some playlists today, that should be at the very top of the playlist, but when you add it, it shows up logically as the last track. I've tried just about everything to drag and drop on this site with NVDA, and could never do it. With Voiceover, it worked like a charm. Slightly time consuming due to the amount of things in the playlist, but worked perfectly fine. Drag and drop is the only way to get it done, and Voiceover, for whatever faults it may have, which fortunately I don't experience a lot of, is able to do that for me. Might not sound like a big deal until you've spent way to long trying to do it with no luck, jump over to Mac OS, and done!

Creating a Hackintosh isn't for the faint of heart, and some things may not work as you might expect, such as iMessage, FaceTime, or the App Store. I've always thought it was far too much effort for little gain. It won't last much longer, because when macOS completely drops support for X86 processors, you're out of luck unless you don't mind running old releases. It's not at all like Windows 11 which we can get to run on all kinds of supposedly unofficial hardware simply by using Microsoft documented bypass methods to ignore the compatibility checks. If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. It will run better and you won't have weird problems.

If it were not for the software bugs, AppleVis would be a very different website.

@Justin,

Does the Drag & Drop add-on help at all?

This one isn't specific to the OS but... audio tasks accessibility. What I mean by this is, if you do stuff like audio editing, sound design, composing etc; the mac blows windows completely out of the water on accessibility. I use reaper as my daw, and while I do use both OS's, by far, I've found that 90% of pluggins are completely accessible on mac, if we're comparing reaper on both platforms. I kid you not, of the many pluggins I use in reaper never once have I needed to rely on ocr or a third party addon to access the pluggin as far as presets etc, save 1 or 2 pluggins, where as in windows its the complete opposite; you either need to ocr stuff or have a addon to make the pluggin accessible, but its never what one would call natively accessible like it is on mac.
As far as bugs, I cant say i've had many or completely show stopping ones, but that's just my opinion. And yes, I know, you can edit and do audio stuff on windows too... but you'll either have to use ocr or rely on addons to make things accessible.
As an example of the pluggins thing. Say I have the same pluggin pulled up on reaper on both systems. The pluggin does have presets, but they're not saved in the reaper's preset menu. On the mac, I would be easily able to access the pluggins GUI via reaper, and choose the preset I want,with only voiceover, and no ocr. In windows, however, the pluggin's gui isn't read or navegatable with screen readers using native commands, for which i'd have to rely on ocr and or an addon to say, select the same preset I did on mac. Again, this is from first hand experience.

I will decline and take the fifth.

I like the trackpad a lot. Honestly I am using it more for navigation than keyboard commands and trackpad is very similar how iPhone’s screen works.
Built in apps are great.
I absolutely love how comfortable Mac is. VO and braille readers work immediately. You don’t need to install or pay extra money for these features. Also, Mac and iPhone are working perfectly together.

wouldn't it be the most unique and obvious?

Windows does, or at least used to, have a logo. I know it has undergone some design changes over the years, but the basic idea is a flag with a 2x2 grid. Each block or cell has a color. I do not recall the color order, but they are Red, Blue, Green, & Yellow.

Not sure if this is still the case since Gates retired forever ago, and I can no longer see. 😇