According to CBC News, Apple has for the first time displaced Microsoft in terms of market cap. This makes Apple the second largest of all U.S. companies, second only to Exxon Mobil.
The CBC article cites an often-seen figure that "Apple only holds 10 per cent of the global computer market". But pre-existing hardware does not a market make. What counts is what people are buying when they're ready to get a new computer. According to NPD, Apple nabs 91% of the market for premium ($1000+) computer sales.
Security concerns may be one reason driving the exodus from PCs to Macs. While the Mac OS is not invulnerable to malware, there are a few serious distinguishing features that make it less prone. For example, under Mac OS X, applications do not interact with files from other applications. Conversely, Windows applications have a great deal of interaction and share a common registry. On a Mac, root is disabled by default, admin is a separate account and users run, by default, as users. This alone makes Mac OS X much less susceptible to the silent drive-by malware infections that plague Windows users.
On the other hand, many of the malware woes on a Windows computer could be reduced substantially by upgrading to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8. Vista, Windows 7, and IE8 all take advantage of DEP and ASLR by default, making it more difficult for attackers to exploit the OS or browser directly.
Unfortunately, the high degree of program interaction under Windows negates this protection to a fair degree - vulnerable third-party applications like Adobe Reader, Acrobat, and Flash are now widely used as the exploit vector on Windows computers. As a result, malicious PDF files harboring Adobe Reader/Acrobat exploits were the most common exploit of 2009 (and continuing through 2010). Thus even if you do upgrade to Windows 7 and IE8, you should still employ a full arsenal of security software and neuter Adobe's PDF handling.
Just a comment on DEP. At this point in time, it causes random freezes in Office 2007 when doing Open or Save As in Word and Excel. I have found this to happen multiple times on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 computers. This caused a real crisis for me on one brand new Windows 2008 R2 Terminal server–the users were going nuts as their Excel locked up when they went to _save_ the work they had just done!
It’s comical that Microsoft’s flagship OSes and Office Products would have this interaction. I am Microsoft Certified and do nothing but Windows and Exchange server work, but I have used a Mac at home for a couple years now. That should say something.
So the fix is to get rid of DEP and security be d*mned:
To disable DEP:
Open a command prompt and type:
bcdedit.exe /set nx AlwaysOff or: bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff
RESTART
verify it’s off via typing in the command prompt:
wmic OS Get DataExecutionPrevention_SupportPolicy
0 = off
1 = on for all
2 = on for somethings (google this for more info).
Hi Evan, I’m not sure I follow your logic here. If there’s a conflict with a particular program and DEP, you can just exclude that program rather than killing DEP altogether. For steps, see How to Exclude Programs From DEP.