A dirty admission... I lied about buying a windows machine... Bought another mac instead!

Oliver, to be completely honest, I had to switch to my braille display to read this instead of trusting Eloquence—I really wanted to catch any update you might have about the Asus purchase.
Man, Apple has this devilish way of keeping us hooked. I went out and bought a Windows laptop with top-of-the-line specs, and yet, I keep coming back to my MacBook. Why on earth is that?
The machine I bought is a Lenovo Slim 7i: 32GB RAM, 1TB storage, Lunar Lake 258V processor, excellent battery—on paper, it’s a beast. The keyboard even mimics that classic ThinkPad feel, and most reviews rave about it. But in real life, compared to my MacBook, it just doesn’t feel as “premium.”
On the Lenovo, I can feel sharp edges along the sides; on the Mac, the design is seamless. The Lenovo screen literally slams against the base when I close it—I keep thinking the glass will crack. On the MacBook, there’s that soft rubber gasket that cushions the screen and gives a satisfying, subtle “thud.” The Mac keyboard also feels far superior; I honestly don’t understand why people swear by ThinkPads.
Even on the audio side, my AirPods Pro 2 have almost no latency with the Mac. But on the Lenovo—with Bluetooth 5.4 and Samsung’s top earbuds—I notice a lag. It’s frustrating.
Part of me wishes I could just erase every memory of using a Mac so I could enjoy this Lenovo in peace. I bought it Saturday, and here we are Wednesday—I already regret spending that horrific amount of money. My MacBook is back on my lap, and the Lenovo… well, I don’t even know what to do with it.

Oliver misses BootCamp.
Thank you, that is all.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

Two years ago I was on the hunt for a Windows machine, and even found one from ASUS with pretty good specs, but the thing is, I live in Portugal and use US keyboards, and to my knowledge only Apple allows me to order computers with that kind of customization. Not only that but, the site that I ordered the ASUS from mentioned that the laptop had an international keyboard, which I assumed to be the US ISO layout, and then realized that the layout was actually Spanish, so in the end I just returned it. During this process I even called Microsoft to ask if they were selling any laptops with US keyboards here in Portugal since their site did not include that option, and one of the representatives told me that I could change the keyboard layout, which was totally unacceptable to me because to anyone sighted it would feel like I didn't configure my keyboard properly.

As for keyboards themselves, I have two desktop Macs, a 16GB M4 iMac which I will give away soon and a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio which is my daily driver now. Since these computers don't have a built-in keyboard, I also have Two US ANSI Magic Keyboards from Apple, with one of them being the top-of-the-line full-sized with keypad and TouchID for home use and the other being the baseline laptop sized keyboard without any extra features, and I love both of them, especially since they are USB-c now, which was a change that I waited patiently for Apple to make, so even when I'm on my aging 16GB M1 MacBook Air I use one of these keyboards instead of the computer's built-in keyboard because the typing experience is that much better in my opinion.

As for machine learning models, there's currently nothing in the PC space that even comes close to the 512GB M3 Ultra or even the 128GB M4 Max at their respective price points, since the money one would have to pay for an NVIDIA card with similar specs would pay for at least 4 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studios, and even the recently released NVIDIA DGX Spark, which I considered an alternative before deciding on this Mac Studio since it's not that much cheaper, pales in comparison, not in RAM, which is 128GB as well, but the memory bandwidth is significantly lower, and while this Mac Studio only has 16 CPU cores, 12 of these are performance cores, whereas the DGX Spark has20 cores but only 10 are performance cores.

Apple is really on a league of their own when it comes to the cost / performance benefit of hardware for machine learning, as even the performance of very large models, like the recently released open 120 billion parameter text-only GPT model from OpenAI, runs very fast on this Mac Studio, consistently generating text between 90 and 100 tokens per second after converting to Apple's MLX framework, which is significantly higher than what cloud providers advertise for models often 20 times smaller, so I can't even imagine how fast it would run on the 512 M3 Ultra Mac Studio. As a matter of fact, Apple's offerings are so competitive in this particular space, that for the first time ever people are saying that Macs are actually quite a cheap option compared to everything else, and I haven't even mentioned power consumption, where the M-series CPU also beat everything from all competitive NVIDIA offerings by a huge margin.

While NVIDIA remains the indisputable queen when it comes to top raw performance, their best consumer option, which right now is the RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, retails at over 2500€, and that's just a video card, whereas this M4 Max Mac Studio with 4 times as much unified RAM, a 16-core CPU, and 2TB of storage, retails at just over 5000€. The DGX Spark has 128GB of unified RAM but its performance is closer to the RTX 5070, and doesn't compete favorably against the 128GB M4 Max while not being that much cheaper. All the NVIDIA hardware that can compete with the 512GB M3 Ultra, like their H200 GPUs, is so expensive at around 50,000€ that it's not even worth considering in my opinion given that at that price one can buy 4 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 2TB of storage each.

Honestly at this point I only feel bad about not going all in on the 512GB M3 Ultra which was my original plan, so and since my intention is to eventually host a Mac at a colocation datacenter, my next Mac will likely be a rack-mountable Mac Pro with whatever top-of-the-line Ultra M-series configuration they end up offering once they finally upgrade the Mac Pro line, so that's how impressed I am about the performance of apex Apple hardware.

We need a tutorial on working with Parallels, I' using vmWare but would like to try Parallels, my free-trial is over as I wasted all my free trial by not using the app after 5 minutes of frustration upon installing...

Yeah I tried UTM and I did not feel it does what a Windows VM should function as. I felt there is a lag, yes it is minimal yet it is there. ope things are different on Parallels. What is needed from people who are more knowledgeable than me to prepare some sort of step by step tutorial on how to install and configure Mac VM using parallels.

Reading how some people on this forum hype Parallels as almost fully accessible with just one button being inaccessible which then turns out to be the most fundamental button in the whole application along with its whole settings interface, I'm extremely curious to read a tutorial and even listen to some audio of them demonstrating how comfortable and straightforward Parallels actually is to set up and use, so I guess this would be a lot more like a product review of sorts.

I hope you traded in or exchanged the other computers you bought, because holy crap that's a lot of money. And that's awesome that using a VM works for you. I'd love to go the same laptop you upgraded to (M4 MacBook Air with 32GB RAM), but it's a lot of money and honestly, the amount of workarounds you had to go through just sounds fiddly and exhausting. I love Mac, I'd love to stay with Mac if VoiceOver wasn't mid (it works great in some ways but awful in others; it just doesn't work for me, as much as I want it to).

Still, I hope it works out well for you. I love the hardware of the Mac and I'm honestly really jealous that sighted people, and some blind people, can use Mac with no problem.

Remember when a dedicated gaming rig was like anywhere from three to $5000, and had about 4 GB of RAM? Oh, and that was considered, "a beast"?

Ah, The good old days. 🙂

I prefer macOS as an operating system to Windows, for a variety of reasons. It isn't just the Apple hardware that has advantages over many of the alternatives. It's also the operating system, and the integration with other Apple products.

To mention only one example of the advantages of macOS, the upgrade process is arguably better. An image of the entire system is downloaded and installed to a read-only volume, then verified with a digital signature when loaded. The Microsoft Windows update process is notorious for resulting in failures. Visit a site such as windowslatest.com and read all the reports of update failures associated even with minor monthly releases. Of course, Microsoft has to deal with thousands of hardware combinations, unlike Apple, so I don't want to underestimate the difficulty of the problem. Some Linux distributions are moving or have already moved to a process similar to Apple's (look for so-called immutable distributions).

It makes increasing sense to run Windows only if and when there's a good reason, and to virtualize it on top of something else such as macOS or Linux. If it gets corrupted, you can restore quickly from a backup.

I would have said, about 2 years ago, that i agree that voiceover isn't as good as NVDA. now days, i love voiceover on my macs. and i have completely moved to mac now. i do use windows, in vmware fusion. but less and less. mind you, i use a few things with voiceover that some don't seem to know of or use much, and i think it's a shame because it makes life so much better with voiceover. I use for example, when ever on my desktop system, the numpad commander. that thing is just amazing. navigating the os and apps is so easy using the numpad commander, i miss it when using NVDA on windows. i also use the trackpad commander when i'm on the laptop, as of course my macbook air doesn't have a numpad. i've also customized some commands for both the numpad commander and trackpad commander, to let me open / switch to apps. so for example, when i'm on my macbook air, holding shift and flicking down with one finger on the trackpad opens safari. if it's already opene but in the background, it will switch to it without having to command+tab through open apps, which when i'm using my computer a lot, can be anything up to 30 windows. lol.
I've done similar things to the numpad commander, which is even most customizable for these sorts of things. I do agree that there are some annoying things about how voiceover works in some cases, but i think the same thing can be said for any screen reader, or app for that matter. Could apple improve on it? sure, they could. but i do see the point of modifying voiceover on the iphone / ipad as priority, given that those platforms are used far more than their mac lineup.

For what it's worth, you can use numb pad with NVDA. Simply set your keyboard layout to desktop, rather than laptop. Also, there are some really nice NumPad exclusive add-ons to make it even better. 😇

I think that a multi-trillion dollar company doesn't have any excuses to not prioritize their entire product line. I mean it's not even like they can't pay skilled engineers or that people aren't lining up to work for them. Apple is a collective person, and also one of the wealthiest in the entire world with revenues exceeding the gross domestic product of most small countries and probably even Russia, which is none other than the biggest country in the world in terms of area, therefore they can and should focus into everything they sell at the same time in order to ensure that they are providing the same level of quality across the board.

Back when I started college, which was well over a decade ago, I used a USB NumPad with my MacBook Pro. It was amazing, but admittedly it takes retraining yourself how to use VoiceOver.
The NumPad device also was very handy while using Windows 10 and BootCamp, as it meant I did not have to use an external full-size keyboard.
I have no experience with Bluetooth notepad devices, but I imagine they are Pretty straightforward.

Absolutely worth it. My daily driver is Apple's USB-c variant of the Magic Keyboard with TouchID and Numeric Keypad, and beyond never having to enable QuickNav, the keypad also provides a dedicated accessibility control pad that, if properly configured, makes it possible to not depend on common VoiceOver key combinations anywhere, so if you can't or don't want to buy this specific keyboard, at least get a dedicated numeric keypad.

Beyond the numeric keypad, this keyboard also provides a set of extra 7 function keys that you can customize to whatever you wish, bringing the number of function keys up to 19, in addition to a Control key on the right side, full-sized directional keys, dedicated Delete, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, and finally a hardwired Shortcut Menu key that produces a Control+Click or right mouse Click event.

so I'm someone who has been used to the current layout for basically forever. And whenever I saw say, a windows device with a numpad it just felt incredibly awkward for me, my first ever laptop was a 2015 macbook air for about 5 years, and the rest of my devices were either macbooks or laptops with similar layouts, so I'm wondering.
what's the difference, give me an example of what numpad let you do that non-numpad wouldn't. I could venture a guess, maybe you could move around and enter and leave groups/tables/etc with just one click on numpads instead of clicking multiple buttons, but well I got already used to how things work so I don't think that'll be worth it, anything else?
it's just curiosity. Since from my understanding a numpad is never standard on apple devices and you have to go out of your way to get one. So seeing people liking it that much surprises me.

Hi,
I'm on Windows, and I like having a numpad. In fact, I prefer laptops with numpads. Sometimes I write in other languages, and instead of switching between keyboards and having to learn other layouts, I use a numpad to type accents in languages that use the Latin alphabet. I do this for French, Spanish and German for example. I wouldn't want to go back to having a laptop without a numpad. I had a laptop without a numpad in the past, I could get the numpad, but I had to press a function key or something to bring it up.

In a word—"functionality". A NumPad, or numeric keypad, gives you more functionality and control over your computer. Be it windows, or macOS. I'm sure there's even additional functionality on Linux machines, but I do not have a whole lot of experience with those, so I will focus on Windows and macOS.

Essentially with a numeric keypad, you get the benefit of controlling most of your core screen reader functions with one hand, leaving your other hand free to do most of your core system functions. Also, as Tara hinted above with Windows, you get access to "alt" commands, which are unavailable without the numeric keypad.

With macOS, you get less finger gymnastics while using most screen reader functions, which is especially beneficial for navigating websites, editing documents, perusing your emails, etc, just to name a few scenarios.

Bottom line, numeric keypads make using a computer, especially with a screen reader, far more efficient and enjoyable.

HTH.

So, I've never used a NumPad on Mac. How does using a NumPad with VoiceOver streamline things?

I'm going to quote myself since apparently you didn't read my previous comment on this matter:

Absolutely worth it. My daily driver is Apple's USB-c variant of the Magic Keyboard with TouchID and Numeric Keypad, and beyond never having to enable QuickNav, the keypad also provides a dedicated accessibility control pad that, if properly configured, makes it possible to not depend on common VoiceOver key combinations anywhere, so if you can't or don't want to buy this specific keyboard, at least get a dedicated numeric keypad.

Most of my interactions with VoiceOver happen through the keypad. At this point I could feasibly just unbind most VoiceOver shortcut key combinations and just interact with it that way, since I'm already used to it and find it quite convenient. It's a dedicated accessibility control pad for me, and disabling it is just a matter of pressing VO+Clear. It also allows me to unbind the Control+Option combination for VoiceOver and leave CapsLock as the only VO modifier, thus making it possible for me to use Control+Option to trigger shortcuts in applications that rely on them by default such as Xcode and UTM.

I'm so happy with the keypad that I'm actually considering getting one to keep on my nightstand and interact with my computer on the opposite side of my bedroom right from my bed, along with my baseline AirPods 4 to get the screen-reader output without awakening my neighbors.

Editing because I forgot to link to my previous comment.

Hi everyone, I have never touched a Mac before. From whatever right I’m here, I don’t really want to. I feel like you guys have had so many issues making voiceover in the operating system. Do things together just basic functioning that just seems way too difficult to manage. It doesn’t seem like anything. I’d have a patience to learn either. I have CP so I wouldn’t be able to do multiple key brushes like that either you’ve got a hold so many keys down just to make a book command. But just sounds way too unintuitive to me. Something I really don’t feel like messing with. But then again I’ve never touched a Mac so maybe I’m not giving it a fair try. My school and state agencies always pushed the windows and jaws. I always had. I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody around. The US gets trained on pretty much. So basically you don’t get any help from your state unless you are looking for work or going to school, which I am doing neither one at the moment. So I’m not getting trained on anything right now with jaws or windows. I suppose if I were going to explore a Mac, this would be the time to do it. But as I said, I’ve read too much on here that makes me want to not even touch one. I wish that weren’t the case, but I’ve just heard way too many stories about things that I just do not feel like dealing with. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold that many keys down at once and my hands are smell anyway, even if I didn’t have CP. So right now I’m just going to stick to my computer with Jaws and windows and I am going to stick with my iPhone SE third generation for my iPod and my primary iPhone, which is the regular base model iPhone 15. My iPhone SE third generation is in product red and it’s the 256 gig variant because that was the highest storage available for that phone. The iPhone 15 is the pink one and in the 512 variant cause that’s the highest available for that phone. But as I said, I have never touched a Mac and everything I’m right on here is really not giving me the desire to even try one. I really wish it weren’t the case, but it is. If somebody has any way, they can change my mind. I would love to hear it. :-) I mean, I’m coming from Jaws and windows that I’ve literally use my entire life since I had jaws, which for me was back in 1998 when I had draw 3.3 when I was just 10 years old. I’m 37 now. So if you could possibly change my mind, I’d be very curious to hear their thoughts going from winter to Mac and how the transition was and if they wouldn’t even recommend it to somebody with my particular situation. I mean, I guess I’d be able to use voice control and VoiceOver on a Mac like I do with my phone now. That’s one thing I really wish Jaws had. I wish they had like their voice control equivalent that would still work with jaws because right now a whole crap ton of keyboard commands and I’m still trying to memorize and they’re really hard to commit to memory. But I have some memory issues too, so that doesn’t really help. Anyway, like I said, if anybody could change my mind, I’d love to hear the thoughts. I wish there was a way to like try and back me before I bought one because you know I’m not putting that kind of money into something if I don’t end up liking it. It’s not like buying those digital pianos or something that they let you try it before you buy it.

I did read your comment actually. but you provided the hands-on explanation that was actually asking for in reply to my comment, so thank you. I've used the NumPad in Windows, but never on Mac. From what you're saying, the NumPad on Mac is far and away more useful to VoiceOver users than the NumPad with, say, NVDA on Windows. And I already know, from personal experience, that the lack of dedicated paging keys can really interfere with workflow, especially since the FM plus arrow keys don't seem to work reliably to page through documents for me.

OK, I guess you’ve made it pretty clear for me that there’s no reason to switch from windows to a Mac. I would love to hear other people out of curiosity though. I wasn’t saying like anybody had to change my mind. I was just genuinely curious if anybody figured they could. :-) But yeah, I guess I’ll just stick with what I have done. I definitely use my number pad with jaws and windows. It just make it a little bit easier to navigate. Not a lot, but it is a little easier. I had to attach a mechanical keyboard to my laptop because I hate how there’s barely any touch your key travel with the keys on my laptop. It’s way too late of a touch I can barely feel it so right now I have a wired USB mechanical keyboard attached to my laptop, so I use that. And it feels much better for me.

I bought a mac because real long day battery life for a blind student in college when outlets are difficult to find in classes or outside makes more difference than it might seem. Of course, geek curiosity was also a big incentive, I knew I could be able to adapt to any new environment or screen reader. IMO Ventura was the worst time for any blind person to transition to the mac from windows with bugs defying logic everywhere with VO in virtually most context... Glad that Sequoia and now Tahoe is making this so so much more usable and enjoyable.
I also have a grudge against windows laptops almost cursed to never last more thn 7hrs... Like here in Quebec RAMQ provide us with laptops for free as long as we're in school or adult (not higher studies). It's not normal that a government laptop bought in a random batch chosen by cost saving stats first over raw performance, from a company (dynabook/toshiba) that's relatively unknown in the big names of "business grade" laptop, that I got for free, had better battery life, better booting time (around the 15s), on a worse processor and twice as less as ram, and especially, actually repairable and factory replaced battery that is truly new and gave me another 10hrs for two years, than the hp zbook 14u g6 that my dad bought me for college at half of its original price with 3-years warranty, and supposedly a real business grade laptop, that had a maximum battery life or 7hrs out of the box when tweaked to the extreme to the point of being unusable (out of the box when brand new), a startup time of more than 2 minutes, and that when sent to hp for battery replacement after normal degradation over time they put something worse than the aging battery despite me resending it three times to them...
Even if I hear a lot of good from Lenovo and Asus, I don't have it enough in me to ever trust any windows laptop no matter the manufacturer, even if it's Windows.
Now as I'm in computer science and Microsoft have proven they're not better than apple in terms of vendor locking for software dev (visual studio no longer exists on macs, arm could be a big reason too) I am back to windows for school with the aforementioned laptop always plugged in in labs, because it still can do the job. I still own my mac obviously and will try to find a genuine use case for it now outside school. The audio stack, eco system integration, macos being bsd based with most of the linux toolchain accessible out of the box natively, the speakers!! :) and just everything microsoft are doing to windows nowadays, are as many good reasons as I can think of as to why it may be useful to own or transition to the mac.
PS: sorry for the awful piece of text above, will correct later when on a real keyboard. Hope it's readable somehow.

Since somebody wanted to hear from other people, I switched almost a year ago now, I should go find my post here and get the exact date. There's absolutely stuff that's annoying to do, e.g. if you're on a website and want to copy and paste text somewhere, it's really annoying to do with Voiceover. That having been said, all of the stuff I need to do for daily stuff, I can do.

I switched for pretty specific reasons, it wasn't because I hated Windows or all the machines sucked or whatever, I wanted to play with new music software to see how it would work for me. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that somebody switch. I *will* say that if you're interested, and you can get a way to try it, try it for yourself. Because some of these horror stories people have are really specific.

Here's an example that's been posted for both iOS and Mac. There's a command to read by paragraph, VO-option up/down arrows maybe? Apparently on both operating systems, it is broken. Is this a bug? Absolutely. Does it need to be fixed? A hundred percent.

However, I will say I've been using talky computers since the mid-eighties, and I have not once, unless it was accidental, used commands like read by paragraph or sentence. This is not to say they shouldn't work properly, or people shouldn't be pointing this out, or whatever. Obviously if you rely on these, if that's just how you work, it is going to be really annoying to change, and again to be absolutely clear, they should not be broken.

But people post about this like it's the end of the world and it makes editing text practically unusable. And IMO, this is just not true. Also however, this is my opinion. Again, these commands have been in lots of screen readers for a long time. So if you rely on them, this is going to be a really jarring change, and what's more important, it shouldn't even be a change you have to make, if Voiceover worked properly here.

Again, we also need to consider differing accessibility. SIngergirl mentioned elsewhere that she has to use voice control on iOS. Both Windows and Mac can also do this, I'm pretty sure. Is one better at it than another? I have no idea,it's not something I've ever used, and I'll bet most of us haven't either, beyond maybe playing around with it a bit.

So this would be another reason where I'd say, if somebody is having issues, or even just wondering what a Mac would be like, if they can do so at all, they should try one for themselves. Please note, "if they can do so" doesn't just mean if they have an opportunity or can afford it, e.g. to buy one and return it if they don't like it, but also if they're up to the challenges.

When I switched we got a Mac Mini and we had maybe a couple of weeks to return it, maybe a month, I forget at this point. So you have to be up to the challenge of doing whatever you want to do while dealing with getting used to a new system, (which can be frustrating even when it all works!), and figuring out if that new system is going to work for you in a shortish period of time. That's not for everybody.

Finally, to end my novel, I'd like to give some IMO really important advice. Forget Windows. *If* you try a Mac, just assume *everything* will be different. It won't be. But IMO one of the things that really holds people back with the Mac is wanting things to work exactly like Windows.

So they hit something, and they go "oh I just want to use the arrows by themselves"! Then somebody will mention quick nav, and then you'll have people coming out of the woodwork being all upset that it doesn't work here but it does work there and OMG it is sooooooo confusing!

I don't have that problem, and that's because I almost never use quick nav. In fact, I turned off the two-arrow toggle, and I only use single key quick nav on the web. I just use VO, (caps lock), and the arrow keys all the time. Yes, that means I'm holding down two keys a fair bit. But it also means that whatever I'm doing just happens the way it's supposed to, all the time, unless something's *really* broken.

All of this is to say, I switched, and I'm doing fine. I haven't encountered a ton of bugs. I'm sure this is because I'm not doing a lot of the stuff that others are doing where they show up. But this is *exactly* why I say people should ignore all of the horror stories, and try it for themselves. Because for me at least, it's been a pretty easy transition.

I don't wake up every day so frustrated that I want to go fight a gorilla or picket Tim Cook's house in protest or something. I just get stuff done, just like I did under Windows. I could go back to Windows if I had to, no problem. I don't think I will, the new music stuff seems to be working out pretty well so far. But like I said, I didn't switch because I hate Windows or something. That probably helped too.

Honestly, with trackpad commander, or whatever it's called these days, does anybody really, need, quick NAV arrows anymore?

I don't have a trackpad. I've considered getting one, but of course, if i upgraded to a Macbook, I'd have one, and then I'd have a trackpad for no reason whatsoever. So sure, people need them. Or maybe they just want them, doesn't matter. Like I always say, the more options the better. Just because you've discovered the awesomeness that is the trackpad for you, doesn't mean everybody has, can, or wants to.

But this just goes right back to the point of my novel. People should ignore the horror stories, except as possible issues to watch for, and try things for themselves, if they're really interested. I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question, and had people tell me, at great length, why they don't or wouldn't do it. That's great, but as I always say, I can try it and figure out it sucks for myself. I don't need help with that.

So I mean, say I want to, I dunno, try and use the mouse as a totally blind person. I can try that, and at some point realize I'm not getting anywhere, and stop. It's not like if I start I'll be unable to do anything else. So if I ask, hey I heard Apple has this thing where it tries to let us use the mouse, IMO it doesn't really mean much if people are all "don't do it, it doesn't work". Just tell me what it does or doesn't do, factually, and I'll figure it out.

Please note, to my knowledge there's nothing like this, I am making up an example. So I look at the Mac the same way. If you're actually interested, at some point you just have to pick some use cases, some things you want to do, and try it and see how it goes, factoring in things like the frustrations of learning something new. Because what might be horribly inefficient for somebody else might be just fine for you.

“I am one of the people currently being convinced by the Mac + Parallels option (and I’m also hoping for the guide, mainly for advanced tips). One thing I find difficult to get used to is cursor location. I’m very familiar with the idea that the character announced by the screen reader is the one directly under the cursor. On the Mac, the normal behavior is that VoiceOver announces the character to the left, so you can more easily use Backspace instead of Delete. I hope this makes sense. Furthermore, I really like the integration and the responsiveness of VoiceOver, and I appreciate that when Finder freezes (which doesn’t happen often), the whole system does not freeze as it sometimes does for me on Windows. I am also curious how to use keys like home and end relaibly with voiceover on the web?
Thanks all for reading my ramblings.

Thanks Oliver. I appreciate this discussion. As someone who has used both platforms extensively, I've found that Windows and NVDA are my primary tools for productivity, especially in my role as the manager of a technology consulting firm.
My journey with Apple began back in 2010 with Snow Leopard, and I even relied on Boot Camp during my college years. While I still use my Mac for music, I've found that for the vast amounts of writing and research my job requires, I can't afford to take risks with a less-than-smooth workflow. Our clients have very specific deadlines, and NVDA on Windows simply provides a more frictionless experience.
I genuinely love the Mac, but I believe Apple has deliberately mishandled Voice-Over on the Mac. Snow Leopard's Voice-Over was fantastic, and it's disappointing to see what we have now. I'm not holding my breath for macOS 26 to change the trajectory, even though I wish they would give more focus to Mac Voice-Over. The company seems stuck in its 'Apple's way or nothing' mindset. While I own more Apple products than I know what to do with, I won't be getting any more Macs. At least they're good about software updates for a long time."