Need help choosing a computer

To me windows is much better than Mac when using NVDA. Get a windows 11 laptop with at least 16 GB Ram, a new CPU, something like the 13 or 14 Generation of i7, and if you are into AI running locally, get a Nvidia GPU.

From your description for what you are doing on your machines, I recommend you stick to Windows with JAWS and-or NVDA. Seems to me you will be more comfortable. I am MacOS user since 2014 and it is only the hardware that keeps me loyal to the mac not VoiceOver.

Get what makes it easy and not what others think about Windows or apple. What works for you and which system is easy for you. Windows works for me, but would not mind learning about the MAC. NEO looks good. Do love my iPhone even with the bugs that are killing me. Long live cats.

Do yourself a favor, and get yourself a PC running Windows 11. Mac computers are really, really great... for the sighted world.
For the blind, they can be problematic at the best of times. It's not the hardware, it's not even the operating system, it's the fact that Apple has all but neglected VoiceOver for macOS for the past several years.
Sure there have been some tweaks here and there, perhaps an addition or two. Overall, however, they have neglected the core functionality of VoiceOver for macOS. In fact, if you do a search here on AppleVis, you will find a number of threads about macOS users complaining how they can no longer navigate by characters, words, etc. on websites anymore. However, a decade ago I was doing this just fine on my Intel-based MacBook Pro while I was studying in college.

So, why Windows?
First and foremost, you will have a multitude of screen reader options to choose from. Two of which are absolutely free right out of the box; Narrator by Microsoft, and NVDA by NVAccess. Of course, there is also JAWS for the business-centric folks out there as well. All three of these screen readers have native OCR functionality built into them. VoiceOver still does not have this natively. Furthermore, if there is an application that any of the three screen readers for Windows will not work with natively, there are options to correct this. Add-ons, for both Narrator and NVDA, and scripts for JAWS.
There is better browser support and email functionality for screen reader users on Windows, then on macOS. Also, and because you mentioned continuity, this can very easily be achieved on Windows.

I said this in another thread, but if you get the same types of applications on your iPhone that exist on Windows, features such as handoff and continuity will work between iOS and WindowsOS. Functions like starting an email on your iPhone, and finishing it on your PC. Or checking out a webpage article on your PC, then continuing that article on your iPhone. You can even take calls and send and receive text messages on your PC. You can start a text message conversation on your PC, and conclude it on your iPhone, and vice versa. My point is, Apple is not the end all, be all, for this functionality.

There are probably 1000 reasons why I, a former macOS user, would tell you to get a Windows PC. However, I think I have one cherry on top that may convince you.

Check out this video on EZ Bible, Sam from The Blind Life on YouTube does a wonderful review on it. It is a fully accessible Bible study application for Windows.
Oh, and it's 100% free. 😉

https://youtu.be/KrnEsNpoxWw?si=7ezHFGVergUi0DCs

Testify and tell us all. I am still using windows 10. Long live cats.

From your posts, I think you are likely to be happier with a Windows PC long-term.

I have a Dell Latitude 5450 (2024) and am very happy with it. It has 32GB ram, which is more power than I need but it's nice to know it's there. The Latitude 5410 is a 2020 model, so it wouldn't surprise me if you told me it was slowing down by now. Before my Latitude 5450, I had a 5420 (2021 model) that I really liked and would probably still have today, but for a bit of a drop that wrecked the motherboard.

The thing I really like about the Latitudes is their good battery life, performance, and repairability. The Dell utilities (for Latitude - I cannot speak to any other model) are accessible with JAWS, and there isn't anything on either of my Latitudes that I felt the need to disable. Performance is also way better than the Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 6 (2018) in terms of JAWS responsiveness. I have had no issues with WavesMax sound. Battery life has been very good, and I can get usable performance on battery power without turning settings so high that the battery tanks quickly. If a repair is ever needed, Latitudes are built for corporate environments where companies need to be able to open up a laptop and easily replace parts. Of course I wouldn't be getting into that type of thing myself, but nevertheless I like having something that a computer shop will be able to easily take apart and fix.

From what I remember reading, Dell rebranded a lot of their products. This Reddit comment suggests that the equivalent model in the lineup is now the Dell Pro series.

As for processors, try and get an Ultra 5 or Ultra 7 if you can.

The arguments here for PC are great. So many options, so much to choose from. I did have a couple thoughts though, on the apple side.

Let me start by saying though, I was a pc user for years, all the way back to 1986, if that maters, and through graduate school in the 90s, and many years after. However,, when my unpteenth Dell laptop started to drag major @$$ at only 3 years old around mid 2012, I noticed a trusted friend posting from a mac, so I asked his opinion. Short version, having already learned to love the accessibility of my iPhone and iPad back then, I chose to take the plunge and go with a reasonably cheap mac model for the time. I only increased the RAM and storage, coming from a PC world, assuming I'd need more.

14 years later, I'm still a mac person. I find from a platform stance, they are more efficient on memory utilization, so for most tasks, you don't need to be investing in additional RAM. This might be especially relevant in this day and age of AI server farms driving up the price of RAM for consumers.

As for OcR on VoiceOver, I lamented this myself for a loooooooong time as well. But I had ways around it. I work in a field where people send me screenshots of our tools and interfaces constantly,and it makes me crazy. I already discovered that if I saved those screenshots to my downloads folder, went into finder and pressed the spacebar while highlighting that file, I could have voiceover read out the text in the screenshots from within that preview window, beter than if I opened it up in the preview app. I've since discovered, while I've been recovering from surgery with an abundance of time, that there is actually a VoiceOver hotkey to "recognize" images of whatever. VO key, shift L (for lookie lookie?) will read those screenshots for me inline with our messaging app.

I know, my fault for not keeping up on updated functionality of voiceOver. And yes, there are things that I think are harder with voiceOver than perhaps they are on pc, but honestly, whenever I try to sit down to my Thinkpad PC, which is an i9 with 64GB ram, I end up coming back to my mac. It's just personal comfort.

And I suspect I'm not in an unlike boat to you. I used to use Zoom a lot to compensate for the gaps in my screen reader apps, both on PC and now on mac, but my vision has been declining, and I find myself using screen readers more and more.

I feel like the longevity of PCs is still an issue. With the relentless march of progress, PCs seem to need to be replaced more often than macs. I'm still using an M1 Macbkk Pro with 16GB RAM for work, and it beats out the new PCs my coworkers are using, and they don't have the overhead of screen readers or magnifiers running in the background.

I will say though, again for work, I do have parallels on this machine. And yes, windows 11 runs quite well on it, though I don't have enough need to use it these days for me to spend quality time in that environment trying to figure out the roadblocks I find myself bumping up against when I do load it up. It just feels too cumbersome and not so intuitive to me these days. But there are other discussions on here, and Parallels seems to be the preferred emulator for windows on Mac.

I would still encourage you to visit an apple store, if you have one in your area. They typically have an associate who is trained in the accessibility features of their products. if you're just web surfing and emailing and writing, you might even want to look at the Macbook Neo, the new, cheapest options. And many iPhone and iPad apps can now run on mac computers, not to mention, remotely controlling your iPhone from your mac desktop... though I haven't done so myself.

People love to complain about what isn't, and it overshadows those voices praising what good is out there. I'm sure I'll have some negative input to my thoughts here, but they are mine, and I'm sure their options will be valid. But again, these are my opinions based on my observations.

Take the feedback here, and try both platforms.

but if you choose a PC, and have the money to spend on it, I suggest looking at Lenovo laptops, specifically the X Carbon series. They are little tanks that can take some abuse.

I've used both a Mac and Windows. I have wanted the Mac to work. I have used Bootcamp and VMWare on an Intel Mac, and both parallels and VMWare on a MacBook M4 Pro. The TLDR version is go for a windows computer.

I used a mac for the first time in 2018/2019. I decided to play around with my now ex-wife's computer when we got her a new one. I enjoyed using it, and continued to use it until I needed word for work. At that point, I decided to switch back to windows.

More recently, My Dell was falling apart, and I got a bug up my butt to try a Mac again, and my girlfriend got me a Macbook M4 Pro for Christmas in 2024. If you're dead set on getting a mac, this would give you the ability to use pages on both your iPhone and your computer. Besides the hardware, that's about the only pro I can put on a list of pros and cons right now.

If you go with Windows, do your research. Find out who has trouble with what keyboards. I like the keyboard on my surface Laptop, and I like the the quality of it, but others have different opinions. I did get the version with the ARM processor. Battery life with JAWS is great. NVDA is my secondary screen reader, but I don't run it enough to comment on battery life.

You asked about several apps. If you like the native notes app on your iphone, you should be able to log into iCloud online from your computer and access your notes from there. I tried it once, and I wasn't a huge fan of it. I prefer Microsoft 1Note myself.

As far as a word processor goes, I can't help you. I use word.

Let's talk about reading PDFs. You can upload a lot of PDFs into kindle and read them that way. You can obviously use Adobe for PDFs, or you can read them in Edge or Chrome. Others have talked about OCR with JAWS and NVDA. OCR is an excelant way to read problematic PDFs.

I mentioned Kindle. Even if your ebooks you like to read aren't on Kindle, you can upload them. Then, you're sharing them across your devices.

You can write your texts, see your notifications, and answer your calls on Phone Link. If you use a third party mail program like outlook or Gmail, it's eady to move back and fourth In the worse case, save the email you're writing as a draft, and continue writing from the other divice.

You asked about using a VM and shortcut keys. If you can get them mapped correctly, and people do offer advice on Applevis on how to do so, then you shouldn't have any problems. Key mapping never worked correctly for me. I worked around it in a couple of ways. I used a bluetooth number pad to get insert. The command key, which is where your alt key is, becomes your windows key, and the key you currently think of as the windows key becomes the alt key. Alt F4 becomes command Q and CTRL F4 becomes command W.

You should go find the thread on how to install and use a VM from last August or september. It is rather informative, and you can decide if you want to go through with all of the steps.

Anyway, I realized I rambled a little bit. Blame it on a night of insomnia. To sum up, I think you could absolutely use a mac with a VM, but I think you would spend more time trouble shooting problems, and you wouldn't be happy with it.

A couple more questions to try and help you narrow it down:

• What are your current pain points with Windows?
• How satisfied are you with your screen reader on Windows?
• What do you want the Mac to be able to do for you?
• Do you have the time and/or desire to really learn a new OS (macOS) and screen reader (VoiceOver)?

If you decide on the PC route, I would strongly encourage you to go with an AMD Ryzen processor. They are currently considered the go to processor to get if you are a dedicated gamer, and even if you are not into gaming at all, you get more bang for your buck with AMD Ryzen over any of its competitors at present. My HP is in no way a top-of-the-line model. It is a midrange multimedia device. Having said that, it is still powerful enough to play games like 1428: Shadows Over Silesia and Forza Motorsports with high graphic settings. Both of these games are extremely detailed visually speaking. With my Microsoft Office subscription, I not only get one terabyte of onboard storage, but I also get one terabyte of cloud storage. Needless to say, but I get a lot of bang for my buck with this laptop.

Even if you are not into gaming, a gaming-centric processor means that you will have applications that load faster, multitasking that works more efficiently, and less overall load time than you would on a machine dedicated for schoolwork or business use. I am also coming from biased past experiences, but I feel like my Ryzen does better on battery life than any Intel computer I've ever owned, that includes my old MacBook Pro which I still have to this day, though it mainly sits on my desk collecting dust. It also has a bloated underside, because the Intel processor began to overheat so much that the battery became bloated.

As for PDFs on PCs, you could literally just use a web browser for this. Personally, it's nice to open a PDF in Microsoft Edge, and have the Neural voices reading your PDF to you via the Immersive Reader feature. These voices can also be downloaded to Windows Narrator, and they are very pleasant to listen to. As for other applications, such as a universal Notes app, there are some third-party applications that exist both on Windows and iOS. The app I use, for example, is called — simplenote. It is accessible both on Windows OS and iOS. You can start a note on one platform, and finish it on another. You can edit the note on one platform, and see the changes on the other. As I said before, handoff and continuity is not Apple exclusive, not anymore.

Word processing...

It used to be, that Apple Pages could open up Microsoft documents, and Apple Pages could convert .pages documents into Microsoft .docx documents. So, I am wondering if you cannot simply use Microsoft Office on a PC, and read/edit those documents in Pages for iOS?