Phil,

Those are all good reasons.


Thanks much.

Many Blessings,

Pat Ferguson
"I can Do all Things Through Christ Who Strengthens Me" Philippians 4:13.


At 03:51 PM 5/3/2015, you wrote:
>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.