Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Going over to the dark side

analysis
Apr 24, 20081 min

A note from daughter #2, who had a choice of a Mac or PC laptop for her Ph.D. program next fall. "SK" is Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and SK largely uses Macs: I just confirmed with SK that I want a Mac for next year. It's weird, I feel like I am switching over to the dark side or something. I feel like they should put "Switching from PC to Mac" as one of t

A note from daughter #2, who had a choice of a Mac or PC laptop for her Ph.D. program next fall. “SK” is Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and SK largely uses Macs:

I just confirmed with SK that I want a Mac for next year. It’s weird, I feel like I am switching over to the dark side or something.

I feel like they should put “Switching from PC to Mac” as one of those huge life changes that you go through that may cause you undue stress when combined with other life changing events.

It’s an odd feeling.

I offered to lend her my copy of David Pogue’s Switching to the Mac over the summer. Maybe I should also introduce her to Tom Yager. 🙂

Her decision was influenced by some recent negative experiences with Windows Vista and Word 2007 on her current laptop as well as the institution’s obvious preference for Macs.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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