Need help to choose between two potential braille displays

By TheBlindGuy07, 19 March, 2025

Forum
Braille on Apple Products

Hi
Although I'm posting this under the apple section because that's what I'll be using the most for college and work my question is general.
So my focus 4th gen is starting to have problems. Poor battery even after change 2 years ago, some normal braille cells issues... But the main thing is that I had this for about 7 years now. I often use bluetooth and there are frequent disconnects especially on mac. It's micro usb, and it lacks hid braille and built-in basic note taking functions.
I've seen both the bi 40x and focus 5th gen, and the weird boot and shutdown time on the first one. Especially for apple devices, which one works better? I want to have hid braille so already I'm less convinced by the focus, and humanware I know they have very good quality cells. Plus the 40x has some nice features and a micro os like victor reader stream, I asume it could read the nls files? I'm in Canada but there is this aggregate accessible library where we have things from all over the world including nls so...
In Quebec we can choose between these two. Assuming my request is approved, I'd like to have your opinion guys as to which model works best with which os? I use mainly nvda on windows but for school and basically mobility it's always the mac.
Thanks!,

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Comments

By Sebby on Wednesday, March 19, 2025 - 21:29

You're right, the Brailliant displays have better cells and HID. But they're powered by this weird OS that's not quite as freeform as the Scratchpad functionality on the Focus, and their are no vendor ARM drivers so support for Windows is either Intel or through BRLTTY (see recent non-Apple thread about that).

Guess you have to decide what's important to you. I'd love to hear what others think as well because I'm actually considering going back to Humanware displays myself. The Focus 5 display certainly ticks all the boxes, but it's constantly having faults and I'm getting tired of it. I don't accept FS's feeble excuses that this was a problematic batch: it's clearly a system failure.