The Inclusive Lens

In my last post, I officially declared my departure from Linux as a primary desktop OS. After an exhausting battle with fundamentally broken accessibility tools and apathetic design, I ordered my first Mac—a MacBook Neo. I took delivery of it on March 19th.

The initial boot and setup process was an immediate breath of fresh air. It ran completely smoothly. You just press Fn+Command+F5 and off you go, ready to work with VoiceOver right out of the box.

Time can be a strange thing to track, but it has been a few weeks since I opened that lid. The first few days were definitely an adjustment. I expected friction. I expected to hit walls. But the reality is that the pitfalls I’ve encountered are so incredibly minor compared to the daily warfare of Windows or Linux that it has been, quite honestly, profoundly refreshing. It is ridiculously easy to work around the quirks here.

Let’s talk about the worst issue I’ve faced so far. I got a popup in the background notifying me that I could use my iPhone as a webcam. It sat there, silently preventing me from typing in any text field. It took me a few minutes to understand what was going on. But here is the critical difference: on Windows, a rogue window will slam open, steal your focus, and give you absolutely zero audio feedback to indicate it even exists, utterly destroying your concentration. On macOS, VoiceOver gives you a discrete, recurring beep. That little beep simply means, “Hey, there’s a floating window trying to attract your attention over there.” It doesn't rip you out of your workflow; it politely informs you.

The native ecosystem is another revelation. Apple’s integrated apps just work with VoiceOver out of the box. Pages is fantastic for reading and writing documents, and it doesn't cost an extra dime. I can send SMS and iMessages directly from the desktop without ever touching my phone. When my cognitive energy is too low to deal with a touchscreen, this is an absolute lifesaver. I can make and answer regular phone calls and FaceTimes seamlessly. Web browsing with Safari and Chrome isn't perfectly flawless, but it is highly effective.

The Learning Curve and the Complaints

There was one area that genuinely sucked: the terminal. Out of the box, the combination of VoiceOver and the default Terminal app makes for a challenging experience. I wouldn't call it a completely unusable mess, but it was the one place where I felt a real downgrade. Thankfully, muscle memory and a bit of research go a long way. I got Homebrew running and installed tdsr (a screen reader designed specifically for terminal output). Just like that, I got 99.9% of the control I am used to having back.

That brings me to the broader Apple ecosystem. I am not saying macOS is flawless. There are absolutely bad things and strange design choices; I just haven't stumbled into most of them yet, terminal aside. But I honestly don't understand why so many people complain about VoiceOver navigation.

Sure, there are strange keyboard shortcuts. But you can remap them, and you have alternatives. Caps Lock has been a default VoiceOver modifier alongside Control+Option for a while now. Some shortcuts are simply easier to execute with Control+Option, while others flow much better using Caps Lock. It is adaptable.

Another thing I don't get is the hatred for “interaction.” People seem to despise it, but to me, interaction is literally the way things should have always worked. I’ve been told that in poorly designed apps—like Logic Pro or Xcode—you might have to drill seven or eight layers deep just to access things. I don't use those apps, so I can't comment on that. But when interaction is only one or two layers deep, it makes complete sense.

It makes for an interface that is drastically less cluttered. You don't need to hit Tab forty times just to reach a specific button. Think of interactions like physical boxes or desk drawers. What do you do when you want to find what's inside a box? You open it. You retrieve the things you need from it, and then you close it. That is exactly how this works. Once I wrapped my head around this particular quirk, I started interacting with literally everything—scroll areas, grids, tables—so long as it made sense to do so.

A Painless Infrastructure

System management is almost jarringly simple. Installing an application means dragging or copying a .app file into the Applications directory. That's it. Uninstalling it? Select the app and press Command+Backspace. Boom, it's gone.

As for my backend infrastructure, the transition has been entirely painless. I set up Tailscale on both the Mac and my Linux machines. I configured NFS, and now I can seamlessly access my Linux filesystem, my home directory, and my external hard drives over the network from anywhere. I could literally use ssh from either the mac or the linux machines, although due to my security requirements, that of using a real fido2 security token rather than a simpley key file on disk, I needed to use the openssh port from homebrew.

Enabling system and kernel extensions took me about 15 minutes, mostly because I had never navigated that specific UI before. But what amazed me is how macOS guides you through it. When you install an extension, instead of just hitting you with a hard “no” or silently failing, macOS explicitly tells you the extension has been blocked. It then offers to show you how to enable it, opening the System Settings app exactly to the right category to start the process. You are never left wondering, “Hang on, what am I doing with this here?”

And here is the absolute best part of that process: modifying kernel extensions requires booting into the macOS Recovery environment. It turns out that if you use VoiceOver in your daily system, macOS goes the extra mile and automatically starts it in the Recovery environment too. There is no need to be stressed or scared, fumbling to manually enable the screen reader while wondering if there is something on the screen you are missing. It just takes care of it for you.

Once that was done, I was able to set up rclone mounts for my Nextcloud instance and my Hetzner storage box. Accessing my Borg backups is the next step.

Running like a Swiss watch

Above all of this—above the apps, the terminal fixes, and the networking—what I enjoy most about this machine is its reliability. It runs like a Swiss watch.

I wake up, get dressed, go into the living room, and sit at my desk. I lift the lid of the MacBook Neo. Within a single second, I hear that familiar boot chime. It is the sound of the system saying, “Hang on a second, I’m getting ready.” Five seconds later, I am at the login screen, and VoiceOver speaks.

It is consistent. It is reliable. Every single time.

On Linux and Windows, booting up was never like this. It was a gamble. Will the audio route to the right device? Will the screen reader crash? Will a silent error trap me before the OS even loads? I didn't fully realize it until I had spent these last few weeks on macOS, but the x86 PC world was stressful. Full-time, chronic, underlying stress.

I don't have to fight my computer before I can use it anymore. For the first time in over a decade, I can just sit down and get to work.