Thoughts on Macs after using one for 3 months

By Piotr Machacz, 11 November, 2013

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Last week, I wrote a rather controversial post on why I don’t use an iPhone. This time, I’m sticking a bit tighter to this site’s main topic - Apple. More specifically, Macs. And as usual, we start with a backstory. I’ve used talking computers since 2004. I’ve used just about every screen reader you can think of - first window-eyes, then JAWS, then NVDA when I decided SMA’s suck. Anyway, I was also using a PAC Mate at school for taking notes - even though I over all had issues with freedom scientific, probably the biggest fail being when they took about a month more than they should have to upgrade the PM to an OMNI, which was delayed even more by the guy who then loaded the Polish translation onto it going on leave right after winter holidays ended, leaving me without my notes for a while. Despite all these issues, I did not use a Laptop or even the iPod for taking notes, mainly because the PAC Mate was a lot faster in starting and being ready for typing, having miles better battery life - I could go a week without charging it using it 8 hours a day versus 2-4 hours on any Windows laptop I’ve owned, and it was self-contained and had a braille display (I can’t concentrate very well on what the teachers are saying if I have to wear headphones and also correct any typos.) Meanwhile, just like previously with Android, I was following podcasts and articles posted Online about the competition, having even played around with Ubuntu in a virtual machine. I knew that the Mac existed, it had built in speech which sounded very good, and people could use it. I didn’t see a need for a new laptop until early 2011 after I had a very positive impression thanks to the iPod, and also my current laptop showing its age. So, after looking at stats and somewhat due to the nature of me wanting to experiment with new things, I decided that I probably want to get a Mac next. However they cost a lot of money, which is a definite downside. You probably pay a lot for what I just call “the Apple logo”, and partly the build quality as well. So, the process for gathering money took a bit longer than I expected - about 2 years. So I saw Lion and Mountain Lion come and go, the retina MacBooks being introduced, etc. Finally in late June this year I was able to get a retina Macbook Pro, and here is what’re my thoughts after 3 and a bit months of using it. My switch was a headfirst dive experience straight into a waterfall. As soon as I got the Mac, I gave my Windows PC to someone in my family so couldn’t fall back on it. I had previously used OS X only in a virtual machine for all of a few days, but I had listened and read about Voiceover a lot before then, maybe even too much, so I was prepared and knew the basics. To make the adventure more interesting, over the first week I couldn’t go a day without seeing someone talk about how their mac is now used exclusively as a boot camped computer or someone selling one that was a only a year old. Me, I had no problems with it. The most common issue you hear from people that apparently isn’t a problem on Windows is voiceover going busy. You get that on Windows too, except your screen reader just locks up or an application goes not responding. On the Mac you can at least cmd-tab away from such an application, while on Windows more often than not your screen reader gets frozen and you need to wait for what ever froze it to unfreeze, or quit. Reading email and web browsing also works as well. A lot of the extensions I used to use with Firefox on Windows, like Adblock have safari equivalents which works just as well. Safari also has gems of its own, like click to flash which can convert almost any flash video player to HTML5 which makes it a lot more accessible. I now also use the mac to take notes at school, partly because the PAC Mate decided not to detect the braille display anymore, but it’s not a problem. It lasts me a whole day without charging, boots just as fast so I can start typing, and works with the 2 braille displays I have - the aforementioned PAC Mate display, and a very old Alva Satellite that I’m finally able to use again after not being able to thanks to non-existing drivers for 64-bit Windows. I’ve been able to find replacement apps for things that I commonly do - Adium for messaging, Yoru for Twitter, transmit for FTP, Shrook for RSS, etc. Other apps work better on the Mac than on Windows, like Skype, while others are the opposite - Teamtalk§. Did I completely get rid of Windows? No. There still are things that Mac doesn’t do very well, accessibly or at all, so I have both a XP virtual machine for small tasks, and a Windows 8.1 bootcamp partition if I need full resources (which is mostly for mainstream games). Thankfully, dual booting the 2 systems is much easier on Apple hardware. Speaking of which, I have noticed that lately new Windows hardware is getting worse and worse - look at almost every ultra book. They usually costs as much as a Macbook hair but have half the battery life, a slower CPU and generally rather pour performance. Yesterday I was able to look at such an ultra book, which cost about $1600 where a fresh install of Windows took 5 minutes to boot, NVDA startup alone took almost 30 seconds, and it lasted only 3 hours on battery. Of course, nothing is perfect. Windows 8 has its issues, Microsoft is causing very drastic changes which so far aren’t really working. OS X also has problems, and Apple is also slowly locking the OS down more and more (most of the good apps are not available in the mac app store thanks to sandboxing), and every new OS X release removes something which was useful before (Starting with Rosetta in Snow Leopard, ending with Sync services in Mavericks forcing you to sync iDevices with iCloud instead of your local contacts and calendars.) In conclusion, am I happy with the Macbook and OS X? Yes. I don’t run Windows very often, usually once or twice a month, but just like everything in life it can be improved.

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Comments

By Ekaj on Sunday, January 26, 2014 - 14:26

I am very new to the Mac, having only got mine just after Christmas but here are my thoughts. I think I'll have to make this rather brief as I've got other stuff to do in preparation for my pre-birthday dinner this evening. But anyway, mine is a Mac Book Air and thus far I love it. I'm pretty sure it's one of the newer machines. First off, I have to heartily commend Apple for including Voiceover at no additional cost to the user. These machines are--as has been stated--not cheap and I think Apple did the right thing by including Voiceover in the main system. I'm still getting used to some of the quirks, such as the word prediction thing or whatever it is in Safari that seems to always come up when I'm typing. In addition, my machine seems to be unable to download and install software updates and perhaps some other things. But I think that topic has already been covered on here. Other than the afore-mentioned issues, I'm having very good success. In conclusion, I'd also like to thank the Apple Vis team and others on here who have helped me out. That's all folks!
Hello, I have also been running a Macbook Air for three months or something near. WhileI am extremely happy with it, say that the assistive technology on the mac is mature is too much. The assistive technology on the idevices is mature. When it comes to the Mac, however, there are clearly room for improvement * so it does in the idevices, but idevices are mature enough. What's the difference? In the iDevices, the assistive technology allows you to do basically everything sighted people do. But computers are mpore powerful than an device, and so people in the computers world can do more things than they can do in devices. For example, audio and video editing, office and software development stuff, gaming., etc. Sure one can do audio editing in theirIdevice, so they can do office stuff, but these are mainly activities that people do in computers because they're mor suited to this kind of thing. And, in this kind of thing, voiceover is failing when compared to windows and mainstream assistive technology. I mean, if you have a computer to do whatever you do in your idevice (e-mail, rss, internet, messaging) ... so you dont really need a commputer, just use the device and that's ok. But this all doesnt annoy me that much * I am happy with my Mac. Here is what wont make voiceover work as expected untill Apple changes its mind: In the old windows days, in the ninetyths, there were several screen readers available and, eventually, only one succeeded: JAWS. And why was it this way? Because JAWS developpers were clever enough to realise that support every application would be impossible. Evem supporting all aspects of the operating system would be impossible. It would be too much work for too few staff ... and then they decided to build a robust, reliable and easy scripting engine. This allowed the community to create their own solutions in adition to the default features and redistribute these solutions making the screen reader instantly more acessible for everyone. Apple needs to do something similar. Take xcode as an example: its a real pain to run interface builder, having to lock 25 buttons to put components in the xib and to create the outlets and events associated ... and its not guaranted to work everytime. But this could be a breese to script and integrate with voiceover, allowing in fact for a fast, reliable and secure way to do gui programming, justm like in Visual Studio * notice that support for vs 2005 and 2008 were added by the community through scripts. The very samething is true about garageband and the office softwares. Apple wont be able to do everything we need, in fact when it comes to Macs its failing each time more to extend the support, see the tons of accessibility bugs in Maverix and, we can even say, in IOS 7. But if we could help them with voiceover, we would already been able to solve part of these problems and redistribute these solutions, making it better for everyone. In other words: we do need reliable solutions for office, development and sound recording in Mac ... and we can help if they design the needed features. Marlon