Microsoft Windows vs Apple Mac OS

Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows are two of the most widely used desktop operating systems. Apple's Mac OS X is more commonly known as just simply: "OSX" and is developed by Apple Computer for their own line of PCs, often referred to as "Macs." Windows is developed by Microsoft for any PC (including Apple's).

Releases

OS X and Windows both have a long line of releases in their history. The X in OS X stands for 10, signifying the 10th major release of the Mac operating system. Within the Mac OS X line-up, there have been incremental sub-versions named after felines. Windows began with 1.0, following the numeric system until 3.1 and then switched to NT4. Since then, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 have followed for personal computing, while others, including Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008 were released as enterprise operating systems.

Market Share

The percentage of the market held by either OS is always going to be a murky, unclear answer. According to one source, Windows has a market share of 91.8% compared to OS X with 7.3% [1]. While other sources may claim only 5%, or 3% for OS X depending on how they look at the data. Although the iPhone does run Mac OS X, some do not count it as such in their market share research. Also, sales numbers do not necessarily reflect the true popularity of Windows as most new PCs come with Windows pre-installed, but some users may opt to install a different OS after purchase.

Software

Bundled Software

Software Type	Mac OSX	Windows
Web Browser	Safari	Internet Explorer
Media Player	iTunes / QuickTime	Windows Media Player
Photo Management	iPhoto	Windows Photo Gallery
Movie Production	iMovie	Windows Movie Maker
Development Tools	XCode	None
PDF Viewer	Preview	None
Calendar	iCal	Windows Calendar
DVD Authoring	iDVD	Windows DVD Maker
WYSIWYG Website Authoring	iWeb	None
Chat	iChat	Windows Messenger

Available Software

Software				Mac OSX	Windows
OpenOffice				yes	yes
Adobe CS3				yes	yes
Microsoft Office				yes	yes
Firefox				yes	yes
3ds Max				no	yes
AutoCAD				no	yes
Maya				yes	yes
Houdini				yes	yes
Logic				yes	no
Final Cut				yes	no
SoftImage XSI				no	yes

Security

Malware

In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password... A Mac gets much of this out-of-the-box protection from its open source UNIX heritage. The most critical components of Mac OS X are open for review by a worldwide community of security experts.

Apple touts this feature as an advantage over (pre-Vista) Windows: "On a Windows PC, software (both good and evil) can change the system without your even knowing about it."

Windows Vista recently started to focus more on security by implementing a stricter user-permission policy, but many users feel that the strict policy is more annoying than useful.

Hence, there is no architectural advantage in security between Mac OSX and Vista concerning this point.

Viruses

Developers often capitalize on Windows' large market share and significant vulnerabilities when creating viruses and other malicious software. Some counts place the number of Windows/MS-DOS viruses at over 50,000. In the past, Microsoft's solution to this problem was insufficient.

Infection of Macs running OS X is extremely rare, and there has never been a large-scale infection of computers running OS X. The latest version of Mac OS X added sandboxing to improve protection against malware and trojans, but it cannot protect against all possible applications users can install.

Patches

Both Macs and Windows have patches and/or updates provided online by Apple and Microsoft, respectively. Through one simple button-click change in the System Preferences this can be on or off, to differing degrees. Ever since the release of Mac OSX 10.1 on September 25, 2001 as a 'free update' to version 10.0, Macs can download these automatically or the [owner or administrator] user has the option of accepting these downloads or not: "New software is available for your computer. If you're not ready to install now, you can use the Software Update preference to check for updates later." In Windows XP and Vista, the user has the option of turning automatic updates on or off as well.