I Tried and Failed at Mac OS
Despite my fantasies of a workhorse, MacOS turned out to be a sweeter dream than a realistic boost in productivity. But it’s important to underscore that I am only writing this as a blind user.
Apple, the Undisputed King of PC Hardware
I started lusting after a Mac machine last summer when I acknowledged my Lenovo ThinkPad was lacking in a few areas. It’s no slouch. I’d configured myself a little powerhouse, but when it comes to battery life, integration with my mobile apps and services, and general performance, there was no competition. I started looking at selling my X1 Carbon and weighing the possibility of purchasing a MacBook Pro.
Why not a MacBook Air and save some money? I’m a complete keyboard snob. I make no bones about it. If I don’t experience a better than average typing experience, if the location of specific keys is slightly out of wack, it’s not for me, and for me, the shallow key travel of the MacBook Air ruined what could have been a good match.
Yet, even the MacBook Air is a supreme reminder of the magic Apple wields in manufacturing beautiful machines. Everything from the packaging to the sleek weight of the devices screams superior, and reviews abound from users working comfortably on Mac devices more than five years old.
I don’t mind saving up a little more money for an item that will run the extra mile for me. If you’ve been with me for a while now, you know I value a good deal, and a good deal does not mean it is always the cheapest. If I’m going to spend more than $500 on a thing, I view it more as an investment than a typical purchase, and I had no doubt the durability and reliability of a Mac would prove to be money well-spent.
My Use Case Scenario
I vaguely remember using a Mac in middle school. The screen reader at the time was OutSpoken, but I don’t know that it was any better than Narrator is today. Most of my life has been spent on Windows using JAWS and to a lesser degree, NVDA.
I do just enough traveling to require a solid computer companion. I’ve never been sloppy with my technology, but I can’t afford to risk total destruction if a device were to take a tumble. I recognized the better build quality of business laptops and have since done my best to save up to buy business class laptops over consumer ones.
I am primarily a writer. I do just enough audio editing to hold my own, but most of my day-to-day involves the Office suite, a handful of file management utilities and web apps, a couple streaming services, a multimedia player, a couple text editors, and Adobe Pro running alongside a fistful of Chrome tabs.
I am blind. I rely on a screen reader to navigate the OS. People say a screen reader’s optimal performance does not require better specs, but I have my doubts. Everything will run just a little smoother with enough RAM, processing power, and sufficient storage. Regardless, the screen reader is front and center to my experience on a laptop, and ultimately, this is where MacOS and I would have to shake hands and part ways.
MacBook Pro, The Good
I finally caved and bought myself a MacBook Pro. I dressed it up with 24 GB of RAM, or what Apple calls unified memory, and 512 GB of storage. One M4 Pro chip later, and I had myself what I thought would be a heartthrob. I was so convinced of my devotion that I didn’t even snatch up the best deal. After months of research and wavering back and forth, I was willing to pay just a little more to pick up the object of my fascination from a Best Buy that same day.
What, you think people who write about personal finance don’t have their weaknesses? Everyone has a weakness. I’m just a little more transparent with you about mine.
Anyway, the unboxing was every bit as exhilarating as I’d been anticipating. I’m even loving those pull tabs companies are using to neatly open the box without risk of tearing. And there, tucked neatly into an envelope, was a slab of space black greatness.
I was fully up and running in less than 15 minutes. I would have liked for the laptop to have started talking on its own, but Command F5 quickly launched Voiceover. I had a little trouble selecting a wi-fi network, but this was only because I had not yet learned of interacting with group elements. Otherwise, the setup process was as seamless as setting up an iPhone.
As a blind user, I loved the ability to fully use the track pad. That may sound silly to you as a sighted user, but one key and a twist made it possible for me to make use of a laptop feature I have basically been denied on Windows. For me, it created the sort of experience I’d been hoping, but failed, to achieve with an iPad.
I almost always use headphones with my computers. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised at the sound quality of the speakers, which I’d always heard others gush about but never experienced for myself. Absolutely phenomenal. I think I could have gotten used to using Voiceover without headphones more often.
Considering the excellent camera, I’m a little surprised Face ID has not transitioned to the MacBook. No matter. Touch ID was a welcomed blast from the past, and I never had issues using it it to log in.
As backward as this may sound, I actually enjoyed Siri on the MacBook. I mean, she is just as lacking on MacOS as she is on iOS but interacting while moving about the operating system was quite pleasant. I did not get to engage with Apple intelligence. I hear it’s underwhelming, but considering Siri was already setting a low bar, I think the experience would have been a noticeable improvement.
MacBook Pro, The Not So Good
Remember I said I’m a keyboard snob? The key travel was sufficient. I still like the older Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards best, but all things considered, the typing experience was better than average.
So, why write about it under the not so good section? Because despite the adequate key travel, the keyboard felt, I don’t know, flat to me. There’s no division between the function keys the way you might find them grouped on other laptops. The arrow keys are distinguishable in their inverted T shape, but there was just something bland about a keyboard that could have been designed in a way to make certain keys stand out a bit more prominently. I use tiny transparent dots to mark the 5 and 0 to help my fingers quickly orient to the upper rows. It’s entirely possible this is all I would have needed to make the keyboard feel a little more homey, but for a premium device, and considering Apple’s attention to detail in other areas, I was a little surprised that the keys lacked physical character like sculpting or concave shapes. I feel like it’s the sort of detail Steve Jobs would have eventually noticed. Of course, this is most definitely a cosmetic point and should not, in of itself, discourage you from purchasing the machine if your heart is set on it.
I would have liked at least one USB-A port. I get why it didn’t make since on a MacBook Air, but it seems the MacBook Pro had enough thickness to easily accommodate at least one of those ports for a little backward compatibility and forego the need for an adapter.
For a machine packing the specs I configured, I was not amused to stumble across the [Application] Not Responding message a few times a day. Am I wrong to believe that a boost in power should, if not eradicate, at least minimize these freezes? The glitch would have made my list even if we were talking a pause of a few seconds, but Safari and Finder hit a minute consistently enough to notice. The stock apps gave me plenty of ground to test the laptop, and I never had more than two apps running at any given moment to suggest I was taxing the system with all manner of third-party services competing for power.
With the exception of that last point, these are generally minor gripes. They are not good reasons to pass on a MacBook. At more than $2,000 though, I’m definitely going to have opinions.
MacBook Pro, the Breaking Point
Here’s the thing: If I were a sighted user, it would likely be a Mac all the way. I read enough tutorials, watched enough how-to videos, and chatted with enough Mac users to learn a lot of the essential differences between Windows 11 Pro and MacOS Sequoia. There’s a transition learning curve to be sure, but in my opinion, interacting with MacOS would be far more intuitive as a sighted user than my experience was as a blind user on Voiceover.
For now, Voiceover turned out to be a deal breaker. Tyler wrote a fantastic article doing a better job of describing the Voiceover oddities on MacOS. Some of the minor irritations, like reading the time and battery status, have since been addressed, but too many of his observations for improvement still persist.
Engaging with your computer should not require so much nuance. I get it, MacOS is a different platform and has a right to approach things in its own way, but if basic navigation required as many hoops for sighted folks as it does for blind ones, MacOS would not be as popular.
It’s not the finger acrobatics that bothered me. Well, not in the way people tend to complain. Changing the VO modifier to my Caps Lock key helped to reduce the finger dexterity, but between the key combinations to enter and exit grouped elements and other key combinations just to jump to the top of a window, the experience still felt unnecessarily cumbersome. I don’t think you should have to sit there and have to remember what setting you have to toggle just to navigate by headings or paragraphs. Actually, are you able to navigate by paragraph similar to the CTRL Up and Down arrows on Windows? If so, I did not find it using Pages or Text Editor. Please leave a comment if I am just dumb and did not find the right key commands.
Yes, shortcuts like setting hot spots can alleviate some of these annoyances. It’s rather convenient to jump from your place in Pages to your list of text messages, but the inclusion of this shortcut almost makes me wonder if a software engineer in Cupertino thought to herself one morning: Holy crap, let me create a lifeline in this labyrinth!
One of the Mac users I was chatting with beforehand pointed out that Apple created a means for you to interact with every aspect of the screen organically as opposed to something like JAWS dictating this for you. I’ve pondered on this a while, and no, I’m not buying it. It would be one thing if you could set a consistent means of dealing with grouped elements, but the behavior depends on the app you’re navigating. (See Tyler’s article.)
At first, I thought I could equate the experience to learning the keystroke environment of certain text editors and digital audio workstations. Have you seen the list of keystrokes needed to run Reaper? But compared to my experience on MacOS using Voiceover, Reaper’s list of keystrokes follows some kind of logic. Voiceover on MacOS left me feeling as though I was driving a stick.
Could I have gotten used to it? Sure, given enough time, anything becomes second nature. Voiceover would have kept me young given the memory flexing, but what’s troubling is that the experience did not have to be so layered. Something about this user interface is strangely out of sync with the rest of Apple’s rationale for things just working. It’s almost as if they rolled out the initial version of Voiceover according to what made sense at the time and never bothered to step back and reevaluate Voiceover functionality in the context of the greater MacOS experience.
MacBook Pro, Our Complicated Relationship
You would think, given everything I just told you about what I did not like, that I would be vehemently anti MacOS. Not so. I went back to my eight-year-old Lenovo dinosaur and love the way I can fly around the OS with minimal hindrance. Windows is not perfect, but in terms of JAWS, I don’t need different ramps to hit the proverbial highway.
And yet…
I had to reset the MacBook twice, once because I was just dumb and didn’t know how to untangle myself, and then again when I went to return the computer. There was something empowering about being able to do so using the very same screen reader I’d been using to perform everyday tasks. It’s just one example of a system with so much more potential. I don’t cut Freedom Scientific any slack considering JAWS is their flagship, but for a company where Voiceover is but a fraction of their operation, I think Apple is doing a better than average job of maintaining a screen reader as robust as what Voiceover has become. My observations are merely based on faith that they could go from good to really great if they spent a little more time reconsidering the user experience.
What’s Next?
When I started off with this wild hair to buy a MacBook Pro, I did so with a fixed desire to become more productive across platforms. I never got around to installing Windows on the MacBook with Parallels. I needed to fall in love with the base system. Otherwise, I may as well skip the Mac and go straight for Windows again if all I wanted to do was retrofit the MacBook with my old environment, but sure, I’m curious, that ever present: what if.
I will soon have to replace my trusty ThinkPad T-470. I guess I can’t count on Microsoft supporting my Windows 10 machine after October, but even if I bought myself an extension somehow, I can’t count on the hardware lasting forever. I’m not completely convinced the Lunar Lake processors are as powerful as Intel claims. It’s hard to trust anything coming out of Intel given their recent shuffles, and I’m still on the fence about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.
That leaves Apple’s Silicon chip. I could maybe see myself waiting for the M5 and giving myself another year to see how Voiceover evolves and wait for more applications capable of running on ARM. I think I read somewhere that 2026 is likely to mark the next major redesign for the MacBook, but I heard the same of the Apple Watch Series 10 and didn’t think its release made as big of a splash as people were predicting. Regardless, it may still hold true that the best Windows experience could be found on a Mac machine. I had enough of a positive experience to make me feel optimistic.
In the meantime, perhaps my biggest takeaway was a stronger appreciation for Voiceover on iOS. I had issues with iPad OS. The split screen threw off my orientation, and the screen real estate felt like overkill. iOS just might be the sweet spot. If it’s cross platform productivity I seek, might it be possible to lean on my phone as a viable laptop substitute? It’s certainly more versatile than any Braille notetaker ever was or likely ever will be. Connect the iPhone to my Apple Bluetooth keyboard, and that might just be enough to fill the void.
I hope you found this post at least somewhat helpful. If you’re anything like me, you read and reread articles others have written to try to decide if a product is right for your situation. Eventually, maybe you just have to take the plunge and experience it for yourself, but since Apple products fetch a hefty price, I hope reports like this get you one step closer to making an informed purchase.
If I misrepresented anything, please do leave your correction in the comments!
