So, you may recall that I posted in the basement region of AppleVis about purchasing a PC. Sick of how pants voiceover is with Microsoft Word, the industry standard, I decided to give Windows a punt.
Whilst making my choice, I flip-flopped through many machines. I assume this is the curse of PC selection. I wanted something built like a MacBook Air but that ran Windows well. I would have liked to play games but, I'll come on to that. I also wanted a killer battery, a great keyboard for typing, etc., and so on. In short, I wanted it all or, I wanted a MacBook, but that was a PC... (Take note of that.)
I ordered an Asus Zenbook 14 with an Intel i9 Ultra chip. Satisfied with my choice, I sat back to wait... Then I did a little Googling whilst I did so... Oh dear. The build wasn't as good as a Mac. For ÂŁ1200, I'd hoped for better. So, without receiving the Asus that, I cancelled and ordered its posher sister, you know, the one that doesn't drop her H's and poops with the bathroom door closed. (I have low standards of posh.)
The Zenbook S14, note the S, was thinner, better built with better speakers. Game on, job done... I sat back to wait... In the meantime, I hopped on YouTube and... Oh dear. The slimness of the device, it seemed, meant that doing anything above simple tasks got the processor cooking. A lot of money for something so restrictive.
Thing was, I was looking at pretty premium PCs thinking that, if I'm going to do this, I need to give it the best possible shot. No skimping as I had when I dipped my toe in with the Surface Go 3 Laptop.
But yes, here... The New Surface Laptop 7 13 inch, note the 13 is the smallest and newest iteration of this line. Arm-based, I know, but killer battery and, from all accounts, good speakers, great keyboard, brilliant build. I ordered, satisfied that it was significantly cheaper than the Asuseseseses... And sat back to wait.
This time I waited long enough to have it delivered. Game on!!! Well, maybe not local game on, but I'll come to that.
It's a lovely little laptop. Slightly thicker than a MacBook Air, slightly heavier, but with a smaller footprint. Build-wise, it's better than the MacBook Air for one simple reason: the keyboard is better. I'm not a fan of the keyboard on my M2 Mac. It feels plasticky, and the keycaps are slightly unstable.
I set up the Microsoft Surface Laptop, which I'll just call the laptop from here on out (naming conventions in the PC world are whack), and started to play.
It's lovely, responsive, and the fact that there is a touch screen is even better. It's not VoiceOver and, as a consequence, the controls are intuitive, make sense, and, when I install NVDA, the responsiveness is mind-blowing... At least, coming from VoiceOver.
Windows itself, from a blind perspective, is a joy. Just a couple of button presses to bring things up. No confusion of different folders for apps, the Dock, Launchpad, etc. Just one button, and you can either search or you have all your apps just there. Golden.
The narrator voice is a dream. Clear, light, without being over-human. I even find an add-on for NVDA to use narrator's natural voices.
Then, I start thinking... yes, this is good. It's great, in fact... And yet... It's ÂŁ800. A solid chunk of cash. What if... What if...
I fire up my MacBook, install Parallels again, and start mucking about. I install Sharp Keys, map everything as it is on my new laptop. I turn off all Mac shortcuts, set the keyboard to passthrough always, and install Carabiner Elements to remap my Caps Lock.
Now, I have a PC built into my Mac. Every keyboard shortcut is as it is on my new laptop. I'm on a MacBook with just 16 GB, meaning the VM has only 8 gb ram, but it's fine.
So why keep the Microsoft laptop? I've got the best of both worlds here. My Mac for tinkering, coding, 3D printing, and all the tasty Apple special sauce that links my devices together, and I have Windows running natively in a sandboxed window that, once in, I can command/alt tab through everything, use all the shortcuts and learn Microsoft Word whilst being able to use Safari, the browser I'm used to, to look up NVDA tutorials.
As for gaming... Well, I have an Xbox. I have a PS5. I install PS Remote and OneCast (a 3rd party version of the Xbox app for Mac). I can play Forza Motorsport, Diablo IV, The Last of Us remotely. I can play MistWorld natively in my VM. I have it all... Well, almost.
Considering I was going to dump all this money on a new PC, I start thinking... Well, what about if my Mac was upgraded, if I had more RAM pulling my PC experience up?
Hence... Ordering an M4 MacBook Air with 32 GB RAM, also reasoning that local LLMs might be fun to play with.
And so, I'm back where I started... ON Mac. But I needed to explore the real PC to understand that Parallels is a very viable alternative to owning a separate machine. It's limited, yes. It's running ARM which, though it's a pride of British engineering (Arm is British, boom!), it's limited on the Windows side. That will change though. The fact that Microsoft is going all in on its own devices with ARM is a good sign.
For me, for now, MacBook Air M4 is the best machine I can get. I believe Windows is moving toward a more ephemeral status, in the cloud, in VMs, which Mac OS is very unlikely to do. I feel I have the best of both worlds… Or all three if you include the remote gaming.
Sorry for the long post. I thought it might be useful for any who were in the same boat.
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Comments
Gosh this is a copy of me
Oliver, to be completely honest, I had to switch to my braille display to read this instead of trusting Eloquence—I really wanted to catch any update you might have about the Asus purchase.
Man, Apple has this devilish way of keeping us hooked. I went out and bought a Windows laptop with top-of-the-line specs, and yet, I keep coming back to my MacBook. Why on earth is that?
The machine I bought is a Lenovo Slim 7i: 32GB RAM, 1TB storage, Lunar Lake 258V processor, excellent battery—on paper, it’s a beast. The keyboard even mimics that classic ThinkPad feel, and most reviews rave about it. But in real life, compared to my MacBook, it just doesn’t feel as “premium.”
On the Lenovo, I can feel sharp edges along the sides; on the Mac, the design is seamless. The Lenovo screen literally slams against the base when I close it—I keep thinking the glass will crack. On the MacBook, there’s that soft rubber gasket that cushions the screen and gives a satisfying, subtle “thud.” The Mac keyboard also feels far superior; I honestly don’t understand why people swear by ThinkPads.
Even on the audio side, my AirPods Pro 2 have almost no latency with the Mac. But on the Lenovo—with Bluetooth 5.4 and Samsung’s top earbuds—I notice a lag. It’s frustrating.
Part of me wishes I could just erase every memory of using a Mac so I could enjoy this Lenovo in peace. I bought it Saturday, and here we are Wednesday—I already regret spending that horrific amount of money. My MacBook is back on my lap, and the Lenovo… well, I don’t even know what to do with it.
Ideal
My ideal is a laptop made by Apple that runs windows with the option of having Mac OS as a VM.
The windows operating system is superior for accessibility, at least I think it is, but Apple have it nailed with hardware and, to be fair, interoperability with its other devices.
TLDR
Oliver misses BootCamp.
Thank you, that is all.
Shhhh.... Now I'm crying.
You say the most hurtful things!
But yeah. bootcamp was a babe.
Understandable
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Two years ago I was on the hunt for a Windows machine, and even found one from ASUS with pretty good specs, but the thing is, I live in Portugal and use US keyboards, and to my knowledge only Apple allows me to order computers with that kind of customization. Not only that but, the site that I ordered the ASUS from mentioned that the laptop had an international keyboard, which I assumed to be the US ISO layout, and then realized that the layout was actually Spanish, so in the end I just returned it. During this process I even called Microsoft to ask if they were selling any laptops with US keyboards here in Portugal since their site did not include that option, and one of the representatives told me that I could change the keyboard layout, which was totally unacceptable to me because to anyone sighted it would feel like I didn't configure my keyboard properly.
As for keyboards themselves, I have two desktop Macs, a 16GB M4 iMac which I will give away soon and a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio which is my daily driver now. Since these computers don't have a built-in keyboard, I also have Two US ANSI Magic Keyboards from Apple, with one of them being the top-of-the-line full-sized with keypad and TouchID for home use and the other being the baseline laptop sized keyboard without any extra features, and I love both of them, especially since they are USB-c now, which was a change that I waited patiently for Apple to make, so even when I'm on my aging 16GB M1 MacBook Air I use one of these keyboards instead of the computer's built-in keyboard because the typing experience is that much better in my opinion.
As for machine learning models, there's currently nothing in the PC space that even comes close to the 512GB M3 Ultra or even the 128GB M4 Max at their respective price points, since the money one would have to pay for an NVIDIA card with similar specs would pay for at least 4 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studios, and even the recently released NVIDIA DGX Spark, which I considered an alternative before deciding on this Mac Studio since it's not that much cheaper, pales in comparison, not in RAM, which is 128GB as well, but the memory bandwidth is significantly lower, and while this Mac Studio only has 16 CPU cores, 12 of these are performance cores, whereas the DGX Spark has20 cores but only 10 are performance cores.
Apple is really on a league of their own when it comes to the cost / performance benefit of hardware for machine learning, as even the performance of very large models, like the recently released open 120 billion parameter text-only GPT model from OpenAI, runs very fast on this Mac Studio, consistently generating text between 90 and 100 tokens per second after converting to Apple's MLX framework, which is significantly higher than what cloud providers advertise for models often 20 times smaller, so I can't even imagine how fast it would run on the 512 M3 Ultra Mac Studio. As a matter of fact, Apple's offerings are so competitive in this particular space, that for the first time ever people are saying that Macs are actually quite a cheap option compared to everything else, and I haven't even mentioned power consumption, where the M-series CPU also beat everything from all competitive NVIDIA offerings by a huge margin.
While NVIDIA remains the indisputable queen when it comes to top raw performance, their best consumer option, which right now is the RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, retails at over 2500€, and that's just a video card, whereas this M4 Max Mac Studio with 4 times as much unified RAM, a 16-core CPU, and 2TB of storage, retails at just over 5000€. The DGX Spark has 128GB of unified RAM but its performance is closer to the RTX 5070, and doesn't compete favorably against the 128GB M4 Max while not being that much cheaper. All the NVIDIA hardware that can compete with the 512GB M3 Ultra, like their H200 GPUs, is so expensive at around 50,000€ that it's not even worth considering in my opinion given that at that price one can buy 4 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 2TB of storage each.
Honestly at this point I only feel bad about not going all in on the 512GB M3 Ultra which was my original plan, so and since my intention is to eventually host a Mac at a colocation datacenter, my next Mac will likely be a rack-mountable Mac Pro with whatever top-of-the-line Ultra M-series configuration they end up offering once they finally upgrade the Mac Pro line, so that's how impressed I am about the performance of apex Apple hardware.
We need a tutorial on working with Parallels
We need a tutorial on working with Parallels, I' using vmWare but would like to try Parallels, my free-trial is over as I wasted all my free trial by not using the app after 5 minutes of frustration upon installing...
Yeah tutorial is highly needed
Yeah I tried UTM and I did not feel it does what a Windows VM should function as. I felt there is a lag, yes it is minimal yet it is there. ope things are different on Parallels. What is needed from people who are more knowledgeable than me to prepare some sort of step by step tutorial on how to install and configure Mac VM using parallels.
Agree about the need for a tutorial
Reading how some people on this forum hype Parallels as almost fully accessible with just one button being inaccessible which then turns out to be the most fundamental button in the whole application along with its whole settings interface, I'm extremely curious to read a tutorial and even listen to some audio of them demonstrating how comfortable and straightforward Parallels actually is to set up and use, so I guess this would be a lot more like a product review of sorts.