This ^ and Apple used to be right on the ball with sending out any patches to their OS are the primary reasons it was, in fact, much more reliable than Windows. Now, that was before and Win7 has largely closed the reliability gap, and we will see if Apple continues to slip up. The fact is, the so-called "1 out of 5" Mac virus exploited a weakness in Java, which still was Apple's responsibility to foresee; they were just a little less than on the ball this time.
"I [strike]am[/strike] was a Mac" (buh-dum ching)
Before I discovered the addictive joy of assembling one's own PC, I was a hard-core Mac fan, mostly because my wife was; when she met me, I knew very little about computers, I was nothing, a nobody 🙁 .
To a newbie computer user like myself, Macs were so elegant, so poised in their confidence, so trouble-free, so shiny.
Fast-forward to a year ago and after replacing the video card in my work PC all by my lonesome, I suddenly got an itch to assemble my own box. Now I no longer have the "Mac Goggles" on, and can see their faults, which is not to say that they are garbage like some people insist upon - our iMac from late 2006 is still kicking good, and runs circles around another inherited work box, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Windsor, about the same age.
I will say among other things that I like about Windows PC's is that I much prefer the Windows Explorer environment to the Mac interface, even though the latter is supposed to be "friendlier".