Should I Switch to a MacBook After 10 Years of Using Windows #2?

I think the ansers you got were amazing - far more positive than you would have gotten five years ago.

From this post it sounds a bit like you want to spend money and you want people to push you over the edge. Is that true? If it is, then you should go ahead and do it, if you have the money and want to spend it and know what it will mean to you , then go ahead.

But isn't bieng a blind student of those subjects hard? From memory, the ansers you got said things might not be easier, might even be harder, but could be better, even much better. Nobody really knows and you won't know unless you try, have you got the time, money and mental energy to try? Maybe you have.

Good look wiht it all, my advice would be have both - Windows and Mac, VoiceOver and NVDA/JAWS, it realy is the best way to make sure you can do what you want when you want in a way that is acceptable.

I did a computer systems and engineering degree on windows. I would not have done it on mac. I used Jaws and was using matlab to build neural networks. This was twenty years ago and I'm sure it has improved even more since then.

The mac, unless you are a musician, is not a professional work station for the blind. I use it for writing but have had to adapt because it is what I've got. Windows is far more mature in terms of accessibility and customisability.

I'd also advise against believing you'll get two for one by installing parallels. You won't. Yes, it is useful, but there are keyboard conflicts you'll have to work around and not everything will run either. If you really want to dip your toe into getting a mac, maybe look out for an older m1 mini and see how you get on with it. At this time, you've got quite enough to learn though, stick with windows. It is the professional choice.

Also, I know the feeling. You want something new and better and I'd love to tell you that a mac is perfect for you. I just can't. If you were looking at phones, I'd say iPhone is the best for accessibility, as is iPad, apple watch, apple TV and so on. The mac is the oldest and least cared for part of member of the apple family.

To add my two cents, or an additional two cents, if you want something new, & want to spend money, have a look at those new CoPilot+ Snapdragon PCs that have released recently. 🙂

Just two months ago I would have said don't bother buying a mac as.you will be suffering each seconds. My goal and requirements are the same as yours. I am currently a college student doing calculus and learning programming and IT on my own. The more I master the mac, which is a long process, the more I am happy with it. Sequoia is the most stable release I've ever had, and now that I can confidently use terminal and get all the unix backend I am used too, well I can do pretty much everything. I would say though that on windows we are used to a more polished and finish product as far as screen readers are concerned, and this means everything. That said, my personal theory is that since october 2023 something has changed internally and they are taking accessibility bugs seriously now, or as some say, much more than they were before. The battery alone is worth everything. As a screen reader user microsoft teams on the mac is a joy to use when you get use to it. Programming is definitely possible, you just have to learn the apple and mac voiceover way of doing things. And as always, the more users are professional, the more reports they send, the the better for the community as a whole, at least as of october 2024 with the current trend. Time will tell if this is still true.
I am an advocate of and firmly believe that accessibility should be everywhere, and fortunately american big tech are at least good in that. Why should be so dependent on windows? Now that I have a mac, after the initial year, it was so worth it that I can buy a device, liek everyone, that is made for everyone, and more or less use it liek everyone while paying the same price as others pay. Okay myself I have a license of jaws due to my readaptation centre but I use it as a fallback only as my primary screen reader on windows is and always be nvda, but windows defenders (myself included) should remember that having a fully functional screen reader from the very start of the os, as well as in the bios, is a luxury only mac has for now . Linux... I read an article awhile ago: "linux and accessibility: an unmaintained mess" which is still very true two years later and I 100% agree with every word in it. For that matter even chromebook is a real option, on the web it's absolutely amazing and it's sad that it has so little recognition from the blind community, as it could benefit many budget users, and aside of programming, any regular k-12 work can more or less be done on it and the priority for google now should be inclusion of mathml/mathjax (yes).
Anyways. It's as simple as that, if you really want to try a mac for the sake of having a mac and you have the money, the honestly just go for it! I had an urgent need of a mac back then which might explain why my transition was not smooth, but now I am good!
I don't do professional real world programming on it but in terms of learning to code? It's good. And terminal is all or nothing for me, before it was clode to nothing, now it's all.
For the battery, it might be a silly argument but when you are in public place finding an outlet can sometimes be awkward. With any of the apple silicon macbooks battery worry is virtually inexistent. I can count on my fingers the occurrence of my mac getting even just less cool. Oh and with airpods and mac you have an incredible wireless worry-free experience you can't have on any other laptop or os without messing up with things (yes, easy when you know them but still).

For math I just use latex, and pandoc is at its limit for convertion to html mathjax so I'll have to find another proper latex package. Mathml/mathjax with voiceover support is good on the web, but at least when I started on ventura, equation in iwork apps are only readable once and not navigable which I just reported yesterday to apple (FB15530138). Even tables in mathml work, a minor issue with the exact row column announcement but other than that they are very readable and you can navigate between cells easily.

Preview and pdf is generally good, far better now, and since sequoia we seem to have some automatic ocr but I am struggling to trigger it since yesterday but you can follow that on the dedicated thread. Generally speaking it's a little missier, but better than adobe on windows for most things. The only issue I really have with it currently, and generally on the web, is how to copy texts properly from different element on the web in one shot like we can do so easily on windows.
Pages, and especially as of writing, numbers, have less bugs than ever now with voiceover and the more I learn them the happier I am. Note that word on mac is at a horrible accessibility state, unlike excel which is almost 100% usable and pleasent to use. Powerpoint not so. But for pptx if it's just for reading powerpoints keynote will perfectly do the job for you.
The google suite is... problematic, cumbersome, but relatively usable for the most part when you really get use to it, and it's for that only that I'd rather have my windows machine near me, although I am very able to do team work online live during class while we are in tables in gdocs and multiple edits happening at the same time. Just windows, and chromeos for that matter, have a better accessibility experience.
My final word for now is that once you will be stuck, just don't pannick and stress, and this is a really good advice I'd have liked to know before. Try as much as you can to now discover how you can, or can't do things on the mac in production and where you immediately need to get that thing done, you will really have a hard time then.

be fair. Remember they can't fix everything in one year. Be concise. Don't say as an example only Voiceover doesn't work well in editing documents. Where are you trying to edit the document? What is the program you are using to edit the document? Where specifically are you getting stuck? Is it with comments on is it in a document with a table? The more information you give the better. The last recommendation I would give is if you can get into at least the public betas and submit feedback there.

No worries I'm on the developer I have two partitions. In fact their fix rate for my bugs so far is increasing month after month. But still nobody can excuse that safari does not respond lasted for about 5 years. I don't believe any argument. Ventura and Sonoma were cursed and a real torture to use as even the gmail inbox would make voiceover crash.

Apple Silicon Macs really are a game changer when it comes to speed, quietness, heat, and the insane battery life.
I've been a Mac user fulltime for 14 years, and I've never looked back. I don't code and stuff like that, so my thoughts come from a web, documents, and just general everyday Mac user. And honestly, there's never been a better time to buy a Mac, when it comes to pricing. You can find m series Macs relatively cheap if you go for refurbished options or the M1 MacBook Airs.
Safari runs better on the web than it has in a very long time, VoiceOver supposedly has a very good tutorial in Sequoia(can't speak personally to this as I haven't upgraded from Sonoma).
You can use the ARM version of Windows 11 with Vmware Fusion, and it works great for me. Keep in mind though that I only use it for games. But I've had no lag, as I've had with intel-based Macs.
Being able to seamlessly answer phone calls and messages is great too, if you're an iPhone user.
Plus, you don't honestly have to worry about viruses and stuff like that. I know it may not be everyone else's opinion, but I've done just fine not having antivirus software on my Mac. Now let's hope I haven't just jinxed myself...

I can well appreciate why you would want to get away from Windows. I have found it unreliable as an operating system compared with Mac OS or Linux. Unfortunately, more effort and resources have been devoted to screen reader accessibility under Windows than under other desktop operating systems. This doesn't prevent you from using one of the alternatives effectively and productively, but you do need to verify that the applications you need are accessible enough to satisfy your requirements.

Of course, if necessary, you can keep a Windows installation around for situations in which you really need it. Windows machines aren't expensive, particularly if you need one for only occasional use and it doesn't demand a lot of computing resources.

I have a Windows installation, but I rarely use it at the moment for any purpose other than updating it and testing new software releases. In other words, I'm not using it for any important activities, most of which occur under Linux and some under Mac OS. I just boot the Windows installation occasionally to run updates or to test out software changes.

If you'd rather not spend a whole lot of money, consider an M1 or M2 Mac Mini to dip your toes into Mac land. It's not a laptop, but it's a relatively cheap way to get a Mac and test things out.

It's quite different from Windows screen readers, so you should set expectations accordingly and learn VoiceOver thoroughly. Whether it takes several hours, several days, or longer, devote the appropriate time and effort to learning VoiceOver and Mac OS well.

I was a Mac user before I learned Windows in a work setting. However, it seems from discussions online that those who learned Windows first have a harder time getting used to the Mac environment and VoiceOver.

I'm a programmer and work at 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and HEY. I've been tackling various accessibility improvements lately and it's sad how poor and uneven aria support Safari and Voiceover have as a whole. Things that work perfectly on Windows and NVDA, are quite complicated to make work on mac. Unfortunately, Voiceover is much less tolerant of web semantics errors than NVDA. That means that in practice, when you run into an inaccessible site, the likelihood that you won't be able to use it on mac is much higher, and it's happened to me a lot. I've been trying for years to switch to mac from Windows and it's simply been impossible for me.
Yes, I'd love to have the integration with my iPhone, use Apple apps on the computer and all the benefits. That's why I've tried over and over again. But I end up in two ways. Either I accept that I lose a lot of productivity, or there are simply things I have to give up. Neither of those is viable.

VS Code is not as stable as in Windows at least from an accessibility point of view. Sometimes there are some glitches in cursor movement. That said, if you don't mind that, you can use TextMate, a native editor that I wish I had on Windows, although it clearly has much less features than VS Code.

If you use NVDA, the facilities there are for using the terminal and reading code through indentation with commands simply don't have any competitor that comes close. Yes, you can read indentation with Voiceover, but there's nothing like the NVDA Indent Nav add-on, which you can use to quickly move through code. For me that's a game changer that would take away a lot of speed if I lost it.
There are many other NVDA add-ons that I use in my day to day life to be more productive. For example, one for knowing the position of elements on the screen, which increases the speed at which you do things a lot because it gives you a mental picture of the structure of the page.
Another thing I use a lot is a add-on to read NVDA's voice history, very useful when you miss something it said recently. You don't have to go back to look it up or go into notifications to read it, you just read it by pressing a couple of shortcuts and you're done.

In everyday tasks, using the Safari console to inspect elements is a pain. If you want to go back and forth from the page to the console, I wish you luck, because there's no way to do it as fast as in Windows, where you simply press F6. The loss of focus when navigating the tree of elements is constant and highly unproductive. Accepting that in the real world is impossible, I'd cease to be competent at my job.

Likewise, navigating a website using the arrows, especially for reading documentation, has also been quite inconsistent for me, with random jumps with no apparent meaning that are annoying. Quick navigation is not nearly as stable as it's in NVDA, you could navigate to a heading and try to go back to the same heading as before, and chances are in most situations it won't find it, even if it's there.

I'd dare any programmer on mac to have a competition on how long it takes you to do a certain amount of actions. I'm absolutely sure it's much more streamlined on Windows. It's the same if it were between Android and iOS, where the latter wins by far. I don't think being less productive is worth it simply because you have access to iPhone integration. You can have Apple Music on Windows and it works just fine. Already by just being blind, there are a lot of things we are slower at, we can't be unaware of that. Do you really want to be even slower just because you have a mac?

So, if you want to spend your money and check it out for yourself, go ahead, but if you can't spare it, I wouldn't recommend it. You can go to an Apple Store and spend hours trying things out. Try to browse some pretty inaccessible sites, but that at least on Windows you can get away with somehow. I, for example, tried doing some review PRs on GitHub, debugging things in the browser console, reading documentation, and doing everyday tasks. You can tolerate that in some things you are slower because you are not used to it, it's true. But there are others, where even if you get used to it, it's impossible to beat NVDA. And it's sad, very sad.

I don't like the direction Microsoft is taking. It converts almost all of its applications to an overly heavy web container, instead of developing its own native ones of its own. But unfortunately we have no choice. If you want something mac-like, I recommend the Surface Laptop 7th Edition with the ARM Snapdragon Elite processor, it's very fast, solid build and NVDA works well there. I'd love to hear what you end up doing eventually and share experiences.

This is the most accurate of mac vs windows I've ever heard and it captures everything I felt this past year. The most intolerable thing on the mac for me is still the poor web rendering from a screen reader standpoint. Other than that it's about how much you're willing to trade off. But apple definitely need to listen for web part.

And doing page up page down is apparently a luxury on windows blind users don't have on mac. It's so stupid but text scrolling is incredibly convoluted at best.

When I saw the title of the first post my heart sank -I've seen this sort of thing on AppleVis for a decade and a half!

I have to say, this is the very best covering of this topic i have ever seen! It is so mature and open-minded, it is like somehting you just don't see online (or on AppleVis) much these days.

Good job!

For many of the tasks I need to perform, the Mac accessibility bugs affect me more than the Linux bugs, so I tend to reach for my Linux desktop environment. Mac OS and Linux have the advantage of being UNIX-like to the core, which is an advantage if you're a heavy user of UNIX command line tools or terminal-based applications. Both systems let you avoid the security and reliability issues of Microsoft Windows, and I prefer to avoid them by not running Windows as a primary daily work environment. I also find Microsoft PowerShell to be excessively verbose and difficult to use - it's a proprietary interface that is very different from the UNIX shells used in the rest of the (non-Microsoft) world.

For Web browsing on the Mac, it would be worth trying Chrome and Firefox. WebKit-based Safari has a reputation for being behind Chromium and Firefox in implementing current Web standards, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if people run into more compatibility issues with it (not necessarily related to accessibility).

First, I'm a musician, so not the target audience. I'm not doing stuff with Git or debugging webpages or...

However, so far, I'm finding it pretty easy to switch. This will be my forth full day running nothing but Mac. Part of what's making it easier though, I think, is that I'm just leaning into the Mac way of doing things. Do I have to hold down caps lock with the arrows a lot? Sure. OK, big deal, that's what you have to do. Yes I know there are other ways, I just generally find it the most reliable, and more importantly, most consistent.

So there are just things like that where you have Windows users complaining, and I'm just looking at it as a different way of doing things. Same thing with Voiceover on iOS if you're using a Bluetooth keyboard, so you've got some more consistency there too.

There are absolutely differences. For instance, in Firefox on Windows with NVDA, I open to the address thingy, and I can just type. In Firefox on Mac, I generally open to a blank content area. I hit VO-shift-down to interact, and then cmd-l to get to the address thingy. Is that different? Yep. Is it more keystrokes? You bet. Is it dragging my productivity to a screeching halt?

Quite frankly, no. Now like I said, short time. What will I do when I get to something like Garage Band, and the thing I want is at the other end of a dialogue? Will that slow me down? I don't know. But honestly, given all the vague negativity here, e.g. the Mac is not "a professional machine", with no explanation of what a "professional machine" is or why a Mac doesn't qualify, I thought it was going to take me five minutes to do the simplest possible things. It's not, and I'm at the point where, unless something terrible happens, I'm probably switching.

This is not to discount other people's experiences. For one thing, I have time. That's not to say I'll take whatever, however slow it might be. But I'm not in a situation where I need to get maximum possible efficiency out of everything. In fact, I'm kind of trying the Mac to see if the other way works better for me. For example, I've been told that I'll have to navigate dialogues a lot in Reaper, because there aren't nearly as many shortcut keys. OK, what that means is I don't have as much stuff to memorize. I can just go into a thing and have everything laid out in front of me, rather than trying to remember a keystroke.

Again, could that be a problem? Once I get really familiar with Reaper or Garage Band or whatever, could I find it way too slow? Sure. And I'm pointing that out because I'm trying to be as up front as possible that I am talking from a fairly limited experience. But I also think that's important because like I said, I don't find web browsing, as an example,to be particularly slower than on Windows.

So far, I am doing the stuff I need to do just fine. That's absolutely not the same stuff OP wants to do, I get that. So it might totally be the case that, as you get into more complex stuff, the Mac will be a problem. But people also seem to criticize it on a fairly basic level, e.g. extra keystrokes, and I'm saying that, for me, so far, I don't find this to be an issue at all. I can do stuff quickly enough. So take that for what it's worth.

FYI, I second the Mini, although if you get one, at least an M2, have a cheap mouse handy, we had to plug one in to get it to start the initial setup. But once Voiceover got going, I did all of the setup and I'm running it without a display hooked up. We found an open box at a local store for $463, so a significant savings from $600. Anyway, for whatever it's worth, there's my experience so far.

Khomus hit on something that I think is key when deciding whether or not to switch to a new OS: Having the time to do so. I will add that having the flexibility in work and life to try something like this helps tremendously as well.
In December 2020, I bought an M1 MacBook Air and used macOS almost exclusively for the next six months. I had tried macOS in the past, but I switched back to Windows because of issues with VoiceOver responsiveness on my previous machine and a general dissatisfaction with the user experience. But the ability to run iOS apps on the Mac really got me wanting to take another look. So I bought an M1 MacBook Air and went all in. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. And I suspect that I just scratched the surface.
So what changed between my previous attempts to learn macOS and those 6 months in 2020-2021? I think the big thing was that I had both the time and no pressure to do anything important. If I had to learn macOS and rely on it for work, I probably would have given up in very short order.
So, all that to say... If you have the time and flexibility to learn a new OS, go for it and have fun. If you need your computer for mission-critical work and do not have the time to learn something brand new and do that work, I would stay with what you have if it meets your needs.

For me, I started with the basics. Can I do the stuff I usually do on the web? Mail? Listening to music? File management? What's editing basic text like?

Again, I realize we're not getting into specifics here. But my thought is, if I can't tolerate the basic stuff, the stuff I'm probably going to do every day, then it's not worth it to switch, or even necessarily keep it around as a machine just for recording.

To OP's case though, if you can't handle basic text editing for whatever reason, coding is unlikely to be any better. That's just an example, of course. The point I'm ultimately making here is that while it's partly about having time, it's also about how you evaluate things. OP seems to want to know everything at once, totally understandable, we've all been there.

But it would make more sense to figure out what the basics are, before jumping right to trying to figure out whether it's a good machine for coding. If possible, try to figure out what some of the basics might be, and start there.

Again, if you have a terrible web experience,that's going to make looking up documentation an issue. So there are things like that which might not be directly relevant to something specific like coding, but, if you stop and think about it, they factor in, and they're going to be far easier to learn. They should also give you a pretty good idea of whether you'd want to pursue the Mac further, or that it's not really for you.

Hello,
I agree with Michael's approach mostly; prioritize what you currently need at this point in life, do what facilitates that.
To expand on an idea touched on by some, here is one more consideration that may be important for the future. Do you see yourself coding for specific venues as a career path? In other words, get a job that creates code for others?
Or are you heading towards developing your own software that will be leased or purchased by others? Maybe I'm thinking too expansively, but if I were developing my own software for possible use on multiple platforms, my goal for my own hardware would be to have both. Mac or Win, iOS or Android, which is better? In the long run, both. I would want to create/test what I am creating on any available platform where my software might end up. How do I know if it functions on Android, etc, without testing it there myself. Just a thought.

Here's an idea.
If you really want a mac, you don't have to completely switch.
VMWare fusion is now free for personal use, including Fusion Pro.
It is fully accessible to create windows virtual machines, and on the newer mac models, it works very well.
What I can do on mac, I do on mac.
If I need windows, I just fire up a VM.
That being said, that might not work for everyone, but its just another option in the endless world of options. :-)

I can not recommend VMWare Fusion for programming. When running Windows under VMWare Fusion nested virtualization is not supported. Because of this you can not use WSL2 (Windows subsystem for Linux) WSL2 allows you to run all standard Linux command-line software and is incredibly useful when programming.

I think nested virtualization was impossible at a hardware level with m1s, possible with m2 but not exposed to macos because apple wanted to sell more m3> where this is. On m2 apparently with asahi linux nested virtualization was already possible, according to reddit.

I am not the OP, but I do have a question about this. I tried doing this on an intel mac with VMWare. I don't remember what Mac OS I was running, but I was running Windows 10. I remember having trouble with key mapping and my windows screen reader. I can't remember If I tried it with jaws or NVDA because I use both. Is that still a problem?

You can use this to re-map keys:

https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org

Or the equivalent apple script you can found somewhere on applevis as well.

I run windows through Parallels, and all my development environment is set up on the Mac side. The only thing I run on windows is vscode and a few terminal windows, all of which ssh to the Mac. Mac OS has all the terminal utilities I've ever needed. I can't think of very many that don't exist here, but if you really truly need one, spin up a linux vm, give it one or two cores and 1 or 2 gb of ram and you're set.

The M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max are earning positive reviews at the moment. The author of this article makes the case taht now is a good opportunity to buy.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2521284/for-the-first-time-ever-you-dont-need-to-be-afraid-to-buy-a-new-mac.html

While your setup may work for personal usage I know jobs I have had would much rather me use a Windows machine with WSL instead of a Mac with SSH enabled running a Windows VM unmanaged by IT.

Absolutely. In a work environment, you wouldn't be running a vm through Parallels, but you also probably wouldn't be using your personal machine, because no personal machine, Windows or Mac, will be managed by your computer's IT department.