John,

I checked it out but figured I needed a new computer anyway so if I was going to learn a new system, I might as well go for the Mac because of all it’s built in features for the blind.

Phil.




> On May 3, 2015, at 5:33 PM, john schwery <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Phil,  for Windows on the Mac, if you don't want to buy JFW upgrades, I hear that NVDA is getting better all of the time and it is free, so that may be an option  for you.
> 
> 
> 
> earlier, Phil Scovell, wrote:
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>> 
>> Sharon,
>> 
>> That's a good question and I've been asking myself that same question for
>> many months prior to buying one.
>> 
>> First, my old computer is about 12 years old and is having a lot of lockup problems.  I've replaced the power supply several times and other old parts
>> as well.  I was wondering what I was going to do about buying the new
>> upgrades to jaws, too.  Sandy had gotten a mac air, which is a netbook type
>> of computer, and she has really been learning how to use it over the past
>> year.  She uses it to pay all our bills online and orders her groceries from
>> WalMart using her mac air, too, and of course for all her emailing.  A book came out by the National Braille
>> Press on how to use various mac computers and phones so that helped me
>> decide for a mac, too.  Prices run from 500 dollars on up.  In fact, I
>> bought the MacMini that has 1 TB of storage and the half a TB costs 500
>> dollars or less, if they are on sale or if you buy a rebuilt and certified
>> machine, you can get them for even less.  Plus, I like being able to sync automatically my iPhone and my
>> computer.  I can even make and receive calls on the Macmini.  I also like
>> the idea of being able to give voice commands to the Mac which I haven't
>> learned to do as of yet.  There is a trackpad which allows you to touch the
>> pad as if it were a touch screen and thus move around the screen and do
>> various commands on the computer.  The mac also can run on wifi so one less
>> thing to connect to a router.  The mouse can be used in various ways by a blind user, too, but the track pad is especially designed for screen manipulation through gestures and thus making it faster than sighted people with a mouse.  The mouse is wire free as well.  Macs are much more difficult to hack and they rarely get a virus due to their standard Apple encryption. Additional the voice over personality called Alex is so much easier for me to hear using my hearing aids.  Software updates are free and the same is true for all operating systems.  I likely could come up with more, because I considered it for many months before buying one, but I will be formatting the mac as both a windows machine and a mac machine so you end up with two computers in one.  There is a format procedure which installs windows and then allows access to the mac through a virtual computer exchange.  This means, at any given time, you can switch, on the fly, from mac to windows and back again without rebooting the computer.  I have a few ham radio programs that has nothing made for the macs yet so things like that I can still run via windows.  So, Sharon, those are a few reason why I bought the MacMini.  I'm having fun learning how to use the thing and it will be nice to eventually format the mac into a pair of computers so I can move my old computer elsewhere or get rid of it all together.  Oh, yes, I got this mac due to the voice recognition software.  I'm hoping it works well enough so I can dictate to screen my articles and books but I haven't gotten that far as of yet.
>> 
>> Phil.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sharon Hooley" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 6:52 PM
>> Subject: Re: Working
>> 
>> 
>> Yea, I'm glad you're set up with your Mac!  But I'm curious.  Why would
>> anybody want to buy a Mac when it costs more than a Windows system?
>> 
>> Curious Sharon H.