It’s becoming harder and harder (and hence more and more expensive) to find qualified Mac technicians and support staff, and Macs themselves, with a couple of exceptions (such as iMacs and low-end iBooks), remain stubbornly more expensive than their Windows or Linux competitors
This seems to ignore the fact that many of your faculty, staff, and researchers find Mac OS X to be a far more productive platform for actually doing their work. Many now relish the fact that their research applications that used to be relegated to sometimes-poorly-maintained departmental UNIX boxes with companion software tying them to their networks and office can now be run anywhere on their laptops, right beside the likes of Microsoft Word. Is it any mystery why the familiar glow of the Apple logo on laptops is appearing to dominate more and more IT, science, and engineering conferences?
As to price, about the only place Macs really are more expensive is general purpose desktops. There simply is no good Apple equivalent to a $700 or $800 (or less) administrative PC [note: this was written before the release of the Mac mini]. And I’ll agree that these represent a very large chunk of machines on campuses, including for students. But when you talk about laptops, high-end workstations, or clusters, Apple’s pricing is very competitive on every front. This is to say nothing about the support costs of Macs, which are sometimes effectively zero, as some primarily Mac-based departments choose to forgo dedicated IT support altogether - not because they are forced to, but because they can. Speaking of which, your experience runs counter to ours: many folks here have trouble finding Mac support, but not because of a lack of it; rather, because they only want to hire someone for 5 or 10 hours a week. Interestingly, this does indeed raise issues, which is why I make a best attempt to provide as much central Mac support as possible.
Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that Mac OS X is impervious to any kind of attack. But there is simply no suitable vector, akin to similar past (or present) vectors on Windows, for mass-propagation of any type of malware. Does this mean that there can’t be a virus, or spyware, or any other manner of untoward software for Mac OS X? Of course not. But with no mechanism to easily spread en masse, it’s useless. Most Mac OS X machines don’t even have any open ports, and never will, meaning that the vector MUST be something like email or web. And then how does it spread? An email virus on Mac OS X would have to have its own MTA and it’s not as easy to do the Outlook-email-to-everyone-in-your-addressbook type thing. Does that mean it’s impossible? Of course not.
Even so, at present, Mac OS X is inherently a far more secure platform than Windows, period.
(Quoted from Dave Schroeder, member of the Division of Information Technology of the University of Wisconsin.)