Apples use the exact same hard drive technology as PCs. I don’t think even the ardent Mac cultists claim that you don’t need to back up your hard drive if you use a Mac.
No, and Apple even offers specific transparent backup drives and technology (Time Machine, Time Capsule).
The difference is that Apple’s drives tend to be the models that are normally sold at retail with a 3 year or longer warranty (i.e., higher quality). Dell and other makers, on the other hand, uniformly choose the cheaper ones - the 1 year or less warranty models.
This is why Apple hard drives tend to go out less than Dell drives, among other reasons.
Apple has also had accelerometers in its laptops for years to park the drive heads in case of an impact. The accelerometers are also cool toys as you can access them through an API. One makes it look like everything on your desktop is affected by gravity. When it starts everything falls to the bottom with realistic physics. Tilt to the left, everything slides to the left and piles up on that side of the screen, and keeps working as you rotate it 360.
Another important aspect is that Apple pays a lot of attention to case design and cooling. The PowerMac G5 had IIRC nine variable speed fans and four separate temperature zones.
Name one Apple/MacOSX virus/trojan/other that can trash a hard drive (or do anything else bad)...
I know folks who got hit with early worms and virii who lost entire hard drives of data... running Windows.
I know ZERO Mac users who have lost entire hard drives to similar circumstances.
But yes, the hard drives are physically the same. But the OS is different... and that is the point.
As a followup, go configure a Dell Optiplex 330 on their web site. (I just did this for a client.) You’ll notice that when you get to the hard drive options, you have an 80gb, a 160gb, and a “160gb High Reliability” drive. Note that you have to pay extra to get what Dell is calling a “High Reliability” drive.
Well, what Dell calls a “high reliability” drive is what Apple calls “the hard drives we always ship with our systems.”
Re: never backing up a Mac hard drive.
Who ever said that? Certainly not me.