Go for what you are comfortable with.
Personaly I haven’t had much experience with Mac’s (Am a Network Engineer for an ASP with pretty extensive MS experience) but both OS’s get the core job done. PC’s offer better variety in hardware and software (particulary games) and are a little more affordable. Mac’s are a little bit more stable and offer some ease of use and design features that are attractive to an average home user. They also used to be the tool of choice for serious graphic design....although this has become less true over the years.
If you are a reasonably saavy PC user, the difference in reliablty between them and Mac’s is fairly negilgable these days. As far as security, the Mac OS (OS X) really doesn’t have any fewer security flaws then Windows.... it’s just that Windows has a much larger market share and therefore is alot bigger target. Most malicious users want to find the most target rich environment they can for thier malware... which means they tend to target Windows instead of Mac.... all the stuff you here about Windows being more virus prone has alot more to do with that then any inherint difference in quality of security design between MAC and Windows.
If you truely want better security by design you are usualy better off going with some flavor of Unix....since it tends to allow you much more granualar control over the nuts and bolts of how the OS works...that tends to come with the trade off of more overhead in administration though.
If you know what you are doing, recent versions of Windows (2000 onward) can be very stable and secure. It’s just about knowing how to configure it and keeping up with patches and buying quality hardware to run on.
MAC’s tend to gain in stability over PC’s simply because they have much tighter control over the hardware (and to some extent software) that go into them. The trade off with that, of course, is that you have fewer choices in hardware vendors and the cost of components and services is therefore driven up.
Alot of the historical instability with the Windows OS has more to do with buggy device drivers or poorly written applications then it does any faults in the core O.S. (believe me, there are still plenty faults in the core O.S. too....but you’ll find them in pretty much any consumer O.S.). Microsoft tried to address this with it’s Hardware Abstraction Layer design which was supposed to insulate applications from interacting with the Hardware directly.... this has been partialy successfull... but with most things (even the OSI model itself) the Reality often doesn’t match up with Theory very well.
You are right. Because you don't have much experience with Macs, you don't know very much about Macs.
Your "Security by Obscurity" claim. There are now approximately 30,000,000 OSX Macs in use. THIRTY MILLION. Macs now represent approximately 8.3% of the overall US computer market in US sales and among non-business consumers they are approaching 20%! That is not obscure.
The vast majority of those Macs, probably in excess of 95%, are running bare, naked on the Internet without any anti-viral or anti-spy ware of any kind. Many of them without a firewall... and yet there are still ZERO self-replicating viruses or worms, or self installing spyware in the wild. OSX is approaching 7 years on the market and successful hacking of an out-of-the-box OSX Mac is also so rare that prizes are offered at hacker contests for someone who might accomplish that task. It has still not been accomplished without lowering the rules and opening the Mac up.
There are a few trojans... but that require quite a bit of user participation to download, install and run... giving administrator permission at every step.
Incidentally, demographic studies of Mac and PC users show that Mac users tend to be a bit more affluent than PC users and so should be the easy and desirable target for hackers.
If you truely want better security by design you are usualy better off going with some flavor of Unix...
That's good advice, Grumpy. You are aware that Apple Mac OSX is one of the three certified UNIX OSes on the market, aren't you?
"Leopard is an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Since Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code, you can deploy it in environments that demand full conformance — complete with hooks to maintain compatibility with existing software."