Mac purchase choice for computerscience student

By I talk Tech and More, 2 May, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello all,
I hope you are all in good spirits.
I am a high school student about to enter university for computer science and I am here for some advice on mac vs windows.
I have experience with both, I have used a macbook pro with the m1 pro chip for a while for school work, and an intel i7 dell pc as well. At some point in my academic journey I had to start using the PC again, after using the mac when younger. Since then, I've gotten used to using Jaws for everything from work in google sweet, web tasks, basic usage of vs code, recently codex, and some commandline stuff along with windows settings and file explorer.
Thing is, I believe that although not all the issues I had with my mac are specific to that machine, some of the things i've faced seem to be things other Voiceover users do not face on their m2, m3, or m4 machines with less cores than mine. Because of this, I have the feeling that despite trying multiple times with my m1 pro, and with the understanding that voiceover is simply not great with some web tasks in Safari, and math work is not the best, that in things like development, Voiceover deserves some slack and it might just be a issue with my system.
Because of this, I am considering a secondary machine along side my intel i7 pc until I buy a fully upgraded system in 2 years. I also get a good chunk of funding for the purchase. I thought because many in software engineering which i will be studying use macs, I should give it a try. If I don't like it, i can sell it off when I upgrade in 2 years and use the extra cash for a good PC.
So my questions for you all are:
1: For a secondary machine, should I go by a refirbished certified macBook air m3 or m4, to test voiceover again, and if I like it upgrade to a maxed out mac instead of windows in 2 years? Or should I get a Surface laptop or something else instead? I intend on trying getting windows running on the mac if i get one and also testing development tools I will need with voiceover. hopefully it is more snappy and less glitchy than my recent experiences with mac.
2: Software engineers that have used windows or mac, do you prefer one or the other? Has it impacted your studies or job searching?
3: Any fellow students here that could share your experiences?
If anyone is interested in the issues I have had, feel free to reach out. As I said, I have tried every fix i could find, that other mac users in the community gave, and that a contact at apple suggested as well. Clearly there are some things that are an issue with Voiceover globally, and others are issues only i have encountered.
Thanks

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Comments

By Brian on Saturday, May 2, 2026 - 22:19

Hi,

I was in college back when Catalina and earlier versions of macOS/Mac OS X were the "new kid on the block". I went through a number of programming courses, including Java/Scala, C++, Python, and some web stuff (PHP/HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc). When I was learning to code, I ended up doing everything in a text editor, though I forget the name at the time. It was not the default, "Text Edit", app that comes with Mac. Anyways for me there were a few pros and cons to macOS back then.

Pros:
• Mac Terminal. As much as I prefer Windows these days, Mac Terminal was then, and will always be, Boss!
• Homebrew. Really good for installing environments and applications related to programming.
• Mac has some 3rd party word processing applications that work in tandem with Mac Terminal, which can make your coding a little less headache inducing.
• Xcode. Apple's proprietary integrated development environment, or IDE, allows you to write code in a multitude of programming languages. Back when I was coding academically, I preferred writing code within a text editing application, but Xcode is there nonetheless.
• Applescript. A decent environment for writing and compiling Java code.

Cons:
• These days VoiceOver is hit or miss when it comes to Terminal and Xcode. Just search AppleVis for threads about this.
• If you are more comfortable using an IDE over Terminal, you may be limited on your choices. See above about Xcode.
• Many users here on AppleVis have reported odd issues with VoiceOver, including difficulties with word processing and granular navigation, i.e. navigating by character, word, etc.
• There are a multitude of issues with 3rd party web browsers over the native Safari, and of course the Safari Not Responding bug, or SNR, is still around. TLDR you will find yourself switching between multiple web browsers in order to be productive.

Admittedly it has been a couple of years since I used macOS, but these are my observations regardless, both from my own experiences and the plethora of posts here in the past several years with regards to issues on the Mac.

I will get a lot of flack for this, but I would strongly encourage you to stick to a PC running Windows 11 for your CompSci needs. Both JAWS and NVDA are excellent for writing code.
Some other attributes are...

Pros:
• Access to multiple screen readers.
• Web browsers, both native and 3rd party, just work better within the Windows environment.
• Notepad++. An excellent text editor for writing code.
• Adobe Dreamweaver. If you end up doing web coding, which you most likely will in CompSci, Dreamweaver is excellent for web design, as it has a built-in text editting mode, which worked with JAWS and NVDA when I was studying Webcoding with Dreamweaver (Yes, this was the actual course title).
• Multiple Commandline apps at your fingertips. Windows Terminal/PowerShell, Command Prompt, Solarputty, etc.
• Some of the IDEs work with JAWS/NVDA.
• There are a plethora of tools for CompSci, and while not every one will be accessible, plenty are.

Cons:
• Battery life. Everybody and their second cousin, twice removed, love to bash Windows for having poor battery life. Truth be told, if you are doing a ton of coding, you will likely be plugged in. Even on a Mac. 😝
• Build quality. Another negative point for most Windows-based machines. Mac enthusiasts love to point this out. I love to point out that SNR does not exist on my PC. 😇
• The dreadful CoPilot key. These have been popping up in the past couple of years. The CoPilot+ PCs are sleek, powerful, and are running on the ARM processors. Sadly though, Microsoft decided to replace the right control key with a dedicated CoPilot key. As its name suggests, it will activate CoPilot on demand. Luckily there are ways to remap the key back to the standard right control, but it is a tricky process.
• Bloatware. This can be avoided for the most part with a Surface™ machine. Otherwise you will have to get rid of excess applications if you go with one of the major vendors (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc)

I hope this info helps you make an informed decision. Best of luck on your studies, and happy coding! 😊

By Zach M on Saturday, May 2, 2026 - 22:56

So, if you're buying a mac, regarding the mac you should buy? get yourself a base level m5 air, unless you really plan on slamming the mac. because, I have an m1 macbook air, and use xcode with claude and gemini all the time, and it works well enough. with that being said, and regarding the rest of your issues.
Safari? I totally agree, safari could use a lot of love. My personal advice? Use either chrome or a chromium web browser. things are a lot more solid, especially if you're using anything like google docs and the g suite of apps, (most colleges are these days).
Visual Studio/visual studio code are great on the mac, I have only experienced vs code. but last time I used visual studio, it was on windows, and it was a hot mess express.
Homebrew? Absolute game changer. no questions asked. even though voiceOver can be a bit finicky with a terminal, you have linux stuff literally built in. You can use the basic linux commands, cp, mv, rm, touch, mkdir, rmdir, chmod, etc etc.
Regarding doing actual college assignments, like if you need to do an english class, you have a few options, depending if your college is picky on what suite of apps you use. microsoft office, from recent reports, has been getting better. but personally, I use ulysses, as it's a markdown app that can export to .docx, pdf, html, txt, etc. it's truly a great app, though it is paid. Alternatively, use either pages, if you want a wysiwyg editor, or if you just want to use markdown, use macdown, from what I hear, that's solidly accessible. Hope this helps!
Also, forgot to add, that mac of yours, especially apple silicon machines have become extremely efficient, meaning the battery should last you all day, or close to all day.

By Jason White on Sunday, May 3, 2026 - 06:52

I wrote undergraduate essays and my Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX (on Linux). I wasn't working in a science discipline, but my use of LaTeX was never a problem or even questioned. If you're in mathematics or computer science, it's routinely used by students and scholars. In Law and the humanities (where I was), the use of LaTeX was not so common, but it did happen.

My advice would be to turn to LaTeX or the new and interesting alternative, Typst, whenever Markdown isn't enough. You can review the output of LaTeX in HTML using any of the available conversion tools (TeX4HT, LaTeXML or Warp, for example). HTML output for Typst is under development. Tagged PDF is under development for both LaTeX and Typst. Preview on macOS can read tagged PDF to some extent also.

Once you have a preferred text editor, you can use it to write code as well as Markdown, LaTeX, Typst, HTML, or whatever you need.

My general impression is that Voiceover for Mac is reasonably good and slowly improving. The hardware and the macOS operating system are excellent, in my opinion. Linux is certainly competitive on the operating system side, as well as being free software/open-source. For laptops especially, Apple's hardware is still ahead in performance and energy efficiency.

By Dennis Long on Sunday, May 3, 2026 - 07:01

If it has been several years I'd take their comments with a huge doce of salt. Those comments using a new computer with new specs may not be correct as of today. I would not recommend windows. When I can I'll be purchasing a mac. There are several reasons behind this:
1 I'm already in the apple eco system.
2 screen reader built in.
3 you can access things like the bios. You can't do that in windows. The list goes on.

By Brian on Sunday, May 3, 2026 - 15:24

For the record, it has been several years since I was in college. It was only two years since I used my MacBook Pro.
Thank you and have a nice day. 🙇

By Jason White on Sunday, May 3, 2026 - 21:53

You have a range of options for text editors, including Text Edit (provided by macOS, but not designed for software development), TextMate, Cot Editor, Visual Studio Code, Emacs (with Emacspeak), Vim, NeoVim, and more. Vim is also part of macOS. All of these have been discussed on this forum, so I would suggest reading prior threads to catch up on those options.

I would recommend installing Homebrew, as it allows you to install any of a large collection of software packages with a single command.

Note also that you can virtualize other operating systems and run them on macOS, including Linux, Windows, and probably others such as FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.

If you're going to spend most of your time in another operating system then it would probably be best to buy hardware for it and run it there, instead of using a virtual machine all the time.