Sticking with Mac: What Keeps You Loyal?

I am just waiting for someone to come on here and blow us away with everything they are doing on Linux these days! 🐧👨‍💻

All the reasons OP mentioned, plus it's just intuitive for me. I can also leave my Mac on and let it go to sleep when inactive. I can leave it for weeks without having to restart.

I have been both a Mac and Windows user. I recently switched back to using a Mac full time. I may add Windows on a VM, but I haven’t needed it yet.

I’ve definitely been unhappy with voiceOver on the Mac at times in the past. If you need proof, just find some of my previous posts. I got so fed up with it at times that I swore to never use it again.

I got a computer with windows 3.1 between fifth and sixth grade. It had a screen reader named WinVision on it. It wasn’t the most accessible thing in the world, but I had Open Book, and that opened up a whole new world in books that were hard to get in Braille. I started on Windows 95 with Jaws in high school. I’ve spent the majority of my life on windows. I have taken the test, and I am certified in both JAWS and NVDA. Windows isn’t what it used to be. I feel the best Windows experience for a blind user was between about 2004 and 2009. Yes, the days of XP.

My first Apple experience was with an old Apple computer as a child, but I don’t remember what it was, don’t count it, and it ended up blowing away. The next time I played with a Mac was in 2006. I was dating a lady at the time who worked for apple. She brought home a MacBook Pro for the weekend and chose to rub it in my face that my Dells weren’t made of titanium. I didn’t have long to play with voiceOver, but I found it tough to adjust to, and I came to the conclusion that a Mac wasn’t ready to be used as a full time computing solution for a screen reader user.

Now, we jump forward to January 2010. I learned the iPhone 3GS was accessible, and I bought one. VoiceOver was a dream on the iPhone. I began to get curious. Is it time to check out a Mac again. I played with them some, and I eventually ended up with one of my now ex wife’s hand-me-downs. I used it for a while, but I was using word a lot, and the experience was far from seamless. I ended up getting fed up and switching to a Surface.

In the past six years, I have gone through two Surfaces and a Dell XPS. The first surface was replaced under warranty when it died, and the second had sound card issues. The headphone jack would often quit working with a screen reader. I wasn’t the only person to have this problem. The XPS lasted almost four years, but it got used a lot, and it was about ready to fall apart.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted. I played with my old Intel Mac. I thought about where windows was headed. I thought about what was important to me.

In the end, Both operating systems have their bugs, and neither is better than the other. Windows screen readers are more feature rich than ever, but they don’t perform the basic functions as well as they used to. Mac is a much more stable operating system, but voiceOver has its bugs which I shouldn’t need to reiterate for anyone on here. Everything else around my house, minus my Sonos speakers which work well with apple products, is Apple. I like the battery life and the build of the Mac. I like the uniformity of the layout and how you navigate it with voiceOver. I like that my computer is part of the Apple ecosystem in my home. That’s why I’m with Mac.

I can understand why people wouldn’t want to use a Mac. I would venture a guess that over 90 percent of us who were born blind and learned to use a screen reader in school learned on windows. This might also ring true for those of you who learned to use a screen reader later in life, but I can’t be sure. It’s easiest to stick with what you know. It’s not easy to learn a whole new layout and the keystrokes to navigate it when you have been doing the same thing for years. I think it’s much easier for a mouse user to point and click on a new system. After all, for a sited user, how you navigate remains the same. It’s only the location of things that change. You have more screen readers to choose from on the windows side. Sometimes they both work; sometimes one of them works, and sometimes nothing works, but you probably like the fact that you have options. You know the problems you have with windows, and you know how to navigate around many of them. Making the switch means learning how to navigate a whole new set of problems.

I don’t think there is a wrong choice, but this is why I’m using a Mac for the foreseeable future.