Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Mark Evans suggests that a Symantec report indicates that in terms of patches and patch development time, Windows is better than Mac:

If you’re looking for a way to rile the Mac-ites, suggesting that Windows is more secure than Mac is a sure-fire way to do it. Symantec claims, however, this is true after completing a research report that found that Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored last year.

There is more to the story though.

There were indeed 43 Mac OS X patches versus 39 for Microsoft. And it did take Apple longer on average to patch them. However, only 1 Mac OS X vulnerability was considered high severity, versus 12 for Microsoft. And the report does make this point:

With the exception of Microsoft, all vendors were affected by longer turnarounds for patches for third-party components that are distributed with each operating system. Upon examining the sample set of vulnerabilities during this period, Symantec has observed that vulnerabilities with longer patch development times generally affected third-party components.

So all in all, the two operating systems come out fairly close, especially given the much higher installed base of Windows, as well as its higher profile as a target of hackers.

Of course that isn't really why people think the Mac is better. It all comes down to the user experience. Mac users rarely notice the vulnerabilities, while Windows users frequently experience pain as a result of a vulnerability.

I'm a Mac user. It just works. When I install new software I don't have problems like incompatible dlls. It just works. That's easy to do when you have fewer users and fewer choices of software.

Funny thing though. Once you become a Mac user you suddenly become aMac evangelist as well. That never happened when I used Windows. For some reason you just get the feeling that Apple cares about you as a customer. I always felt that Microsoft just wanted my wallet.