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Is Mac OS X more secure than Windows 7?

A

Aidoneus

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 3, 2009
323
82
I am well aware that in practice, Mac OS X is vastly superior in terms of virus protection to Windows. What I am wondering is if this is solely due to the popularity of Windows, or if given an equal market share of Macs and equal number of equally skilled, equally determined hackers Macs would still come out as more secure.

Can anyone with more technical knowledge of the underlying OS architectures answer this question?
 
I don't think Mac OS is inherently more secure. It's just a less popular target. That means that is more secure, at least for now.
 
Aidoneus said:
What I am wondering is if this is solely due to the popularity of Windows,
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I never bought into this, "Nobody uses macs so why write a virus for it?" nonsense.

And it doesn't take a technical genius to deduce that were a mac virus easy to do then it would have been done long ago just for the glory. Nothing pisses hardcore Windows users off more than the fact it has yet to be done.
 
daver11 said:
I don't think Mac OS is inherently more secure. It's just a less popular target. That means that is more secure, at least for now.
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The market-share myth is exactly that: a myth. Apple sells over a million Macs every month. That's plenty of targets. How do you account for the fact that in the past 10 years, Mac market share has grown to the highest point in history, while the number of viruses has declined.... to zero? That disproves the argument that it's all market share.
 
daver11 said:
I don't think Mac OS is inherently more secure. It's just a less popular target. That means that is more secure, at least for now.
Click to expand...

I disagree, the inherent design is what makes it safe. OSX is built on Unix and when you combine the Unix and OSX marketshare, its much larger. Besides the recent volume of Macs being sold should make it a juicy target but yet we don't see any viruses.

Window's design is less secure and they tried addressing it in Vista and win7 with UAC but in Vista it was too intrusive and in win7, they adjusted the threshold making less bothersome but that in turn increased the security risk.
 
maflynn said:
I disagree, the inherent design is what makes it safe. OSX is built on Unix and when you combine the Unix and OSX marketshare, its much larger. Besides the recent volume of Macs being sold should make it a juicy target but yet we don't see any viruses.

Window's design is less secure and they tried addressing it in Vista and win7 with UAC but in Vista it was too intrusive and in win7, they adjusted the threshold making less bothersome but that in turn increased the security risk.
Click to expand...

This is the sort of answer I was hoping for; if possible, please could you describe in technical terms why a Unix foundation is more secure than the Windows equivalent?

Thanks.
 
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