I brought my Mac with me-it is one of the most portable desktops I have ever seen, and I figured it would do just fine so long as I kept it booted into Windows (I was traveling to the school by bus, so had no way to carry an entire monitor with me).
In 2012 I volunteered for five weeks at a school for the blind, helping to teach the students assistive technology. Second, the Mac seemed a bit sluggish compared to Windows, and I was used to the instant response of NVDA, so I stuck with what I liked more, never really giving OSX a chance. First, I had no way to hook my monitor to the Mac, and that caused it to slow down, whereas Windows could run fine with no screen. I used that OS almost exclusively for a year, for two reasons. Having been trained on Windows for years, the first thing I did was install Windows on a Bootcamp partition. In 2011, I purchased the cheapest Mac I could, a low-end Mac Mini. Given that positive experience with Apple, and all the comments about VoiceOver on the Mac I'd been hearing, I decided to give the Mac a shot.
I was resistant at first, but eventually warmed up to it and grew to rely on it more than the braille notetaker I had used for over eight years. I got my first iOS device, an iPod Touch (fourth generation), for Christmas in 2010.
