Bill Gates Attacks Mac Security, Apple Ads

By NewsFactor Network | February 6, 2007

Bill Gates attacked Mac OS X security, Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, and even the notion that many of Vista’s features are already available in Mac OS X in an interview with Newsweek’s Steven Levy.

Mr. Gates, on a media tour to promote the release of Windows Vista, has been dogged with questions about Apple, the Mac, and Apple’s marketing, and in this interview, he lashed out strongly against the notion that Apple is in any way superior to Microsoft.

Mr. Gates started off the Apple portion of his interview by touting security features in Vista. Providing a robust security foundation was even offered as a reason for having left out many of the features originally planned for Vista.

“We made it way harder for guys to do exploits,” said Mr. Gates. “The number [of exploits] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.”

In another portion of the interview, he added, “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

Mr. Gates appears to be referring to the Month of Apple Bugs project intended to highlight a new Apple security issue every day during January of 2007. Said project has stirred the hornet’s nest of whether or not Macs are more secure than Windows machines, despite the lack of Mac viruses in the wild.

Just as he did in an NPR interview, Mr. Gates rejected the view of the PC, or PC users as he puts it, portrayed in Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign. Mr. Levy asked Mr. Gates if he was “bugged” by the campaign, in particular the…

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