They (M$) have a big problem with their open hardware platform, because they do not control everything in the box, so some 3rd party vendor can crash the box and you have no clue why. I used to spend days chasing down patches and fixing bugs getting homebrew Windoze boxes to run with cheap hardware.

With open source, you can throw all that free communal labor at it and keep the problem under control, but in a for profit environment, the labor costs will kill you.

So you have three choices:

1.) Expensive, unreliable, insecure, buggy, labor intensive, and useful at the cost of lots of wasted time (M$/open hardware).

2.) Free, reliable, pretty secure, a little buggy, and generic: open source U*ix based systems/open hardware (some assembly may be required).

3.) Very expensive, pretty secure, very reliable, and very proprietary (Apple and lots of dead or obscure companies.)

Apple is insecure, INSTALL SOPHOS - http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition/reviews.aspx , unless you are talking about accessing the hardware for replacement then it is very secure. As for very reliable, its a intel based PC no more no less.

Please see post #10 for a discussion of why Apple (OSX) is more "secure" than Windoze at the kernel level, and also the design flaws that will make it (Windoze) forever inferior until they are corrected, wihich Microsoft does seem to be working on, but it seems to be a two steps forward one step back sort of thing. The war between marketing and engineering continues, you might say.

You are talking about a different issue: network security, where the situation is more similar across platforms, and much depends on the net applications in use, over which there is poorer control.

The issue under discussion was not hardware, but control of the hardware. Apple is a closed hardware platform. You buy Apples from Apple. You can buy PCs from anybody or make your own, and then try to run Windoze on it.

or any other free anti-virus for OSX. Your misbelief that it is more secure is one of the biggest security flaws in OSX.

I run PCs with FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Windoze, depending on the need. Used to work with all sorts of shit.

OSX is based on one of the old BSDs, and I am not giving any 3rd party software root privileges on a Unix box unless I know a hell of a lot about it, preferably with source code.

people do not realize who much dust is inside thier computer. heat sinks do not work if they are covered with dust

However, even perfectly maintained computers are experiencing hardware errors. It's a side effect of taking chip dies ever smaller such that even a stray cosmic ray can flip bits.

software out, tweak, untweak blah blah and NEVER see it hiccup.

Sometimes more when patches are applied that require it.

Occasionally I have to restart Firefox or what have you. FreeBSD was better, or the propietary Unix boxes, which was why they were/are so popular as net servers.

if Apple ceased to exist, though, I would go back to Linux.

... I've seen a few computers for over 20 years without problems.

Anyone that has spent any time around computing/networking hardware of any kind knows that often it is the hardware not the software that causes crashes and instability. Nothing new about this.

I think most people though think of hardware as pure and inviolate. There is the question too of whether this is becoming more common as chip dies continue to shrink.

The think of it as being mechanical.

The Microsoft problem is how it handles hardware failures, or program failures. Even many simple software upgrades on M$ requires a complete reboot. That is because a huge amount of the user interface is intertwined with the Windows kernel.

This is a huge engineering mistake which makes Windows operations susceptible to failure at the kernel level due to bugs in user level software. That's the origin of the cursed BSOD that plagued Windows for years. I understand this is now better than it was, and that's good for Windows users everywhere. Unix (and OS X, AFAIK) separate the UI and kernel, so when a program fails, it almost never takes down the kernel. In my experience, it has never happened after over 15 years of Linux use.

Every crash I have experienced on Linux was a direct cause of a hardware failure, usually a hard drive, so that is an issue that any OS has. Maybe the PC platform is part of the issue here, but I have had many PC's over the years and find them to be stable, even when I run them as servers running 24/7, even for years, rebooting only for kernel upgrades.

These are my experiences. I understand Windows advocates arguments. Some of them are valid, but as a geek I still don't want a proprietary OS on my machines. Windows makes it extraordinarily difficult to change things M$ doesn't want you to change. And Windows has a history of forcing you to upgrade hardware when new releases come out, and upgrade expensive software when new releases come out. That's not nice.

I hate it when a program locks up the computer, you open task manager to kill the program, and Windows tells you it can't stop the program. Why the hell can an operating system not kill a program? Guess I am spoiled from my Unix, Linux, and Apple time.

The culture wherein users are treated like cattle and prodded to click-through licensing agreements on their way through the front gates of the abbatoir, and where you can't tell where the kernel ends and userland crap begins, and the line separating "essential apps" from spyware and even straight up trojan horses is never fixed, and the natives have lived with this nightmare so long they think it's a natural and invevitable situation, which they mutely accept just like their Windows PCs slowing to a useless crawl within a couple of years of purchase from all the accumulated shitware clogging their systems. But that's the culture which they've created and encouraged. So yeah, I will blame Microsoft. I will also blame Republican and Democratic Administrations for not enforcing antitrust laws. But they do what they're paid to do, and the source of that bribe money is ultimately the same fountain of shit on a silicon chip from Seattle.