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Originally Posted by vladinecko
are a lot fewer bugs, security holes or buffer overload opportunities that are so often and so easily exploited under Windows.
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It's not quite as simple. For instance, did you know that OS X had a buffer overflow bug in a PASSWORD field? I mean, come on! That's just ridiculous.
The second problem is that OS X was a rewritten operating system. Apple based it on the Mach microkernel (from Carnegie Mellon), added a bunch of FreeBSD stuff on top of that, and then wrote Quartz/Carbon/Cocoa etc for the user interface stuff. Apple therefore had the opportunity to redesign the OS from the ground-up for the internet era. The disadvantage was that OS X was not compatible with System 9 and below applications; OS X has to, in effect, load up a copy of System 9 in order to run system 9 apps.
Note that because of the hodgepodge kernel design (mach is a microkernel, yet BSD is monolithic), OS X's threading model is just unbelievably slow; hence its poor performance as a server operating system. It's the worst server OS of the lot, in fact. It just grinds to a halt.
The third issue is that Apple uses a closed and propreitary hardware model. OS X developers KNOW which processor and which graphics card and which sound chipset and which wireless card that they will have in the system. Hence, they can optimize for those specific hardware devices. In contrast, Microsoft develops primarily for the PC, in which all components are off-the-shelf. Thus, MS has to support two-three different CPUs manufacturers, dozens of memory types, three main video systems, many sound systems, many motherboards, and innumerable wireless chipsets, to say the least.
If you take a look at the vast majority of blue-screen errors that used to show up on older Windows systems, they were almost always because of driver problems. And very often, because of VIDEO driver problems. I don't know if any of you guys work at Nvidia or ATI, but if you do, I'm sure you are aware of the type of development cycles those two companies have, and the corners they cut in their driver development.
Furthermore, Windows XP with SP 2 (or even before) rarely experienced BSoD that were not hardware related. Also, with Win XP SP2 and a firewall, a windows system can run for months without requiring a reboot or slowing down. The basic premise is that you need to know how to configure the system.
Jamie, you are right that the *nix's were developed with multi-user networks in mind, but take a look at the official bug lists of the Linux kernel; there are hundreds, if not thousands of bugs in the official 2.6 (latest stable version) kernel.
Vladinecko, you make some good points, but saying that the Windows developers were lazy/incompetent/etc is pretty ignorant; if Microsoft could rewrite windows from scratch, and could get away with supporting only a handful of hardware configurations, believe me, Windows would be far ahead of OS X. There are some extremely talented developers at that company.