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.