They've improved a lot, especially their phones, but I'd still never consider them a company that has a really strong focus on security.
That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.
Yeah, they were. Virus writers were not targeting them as a platform because why develop for 10% marketshare when you can target 90% for free. It just wasn't worth it to target as a platform. So there was some level of protection due to lack of interest in distributed attacks, but the OS had very little protection against targeted attacks.
> Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
What an absurd claim. Apple trails behind, it never leads in this space. Windows 7 had numerous protections that had become standards that Apple still lacked when Windows 10 came out.
Linux distros have always required sudo for "dangerous" things. What distros made users root by default?
For another example: macOS integrated antivirus in 2009, while Windows did so in 2012.
To this day nobody else ties their SMC, biometric auth, and HSM together as tightly and well as the T1 did. AS was further advancement of that.
Furthermore, Apple protects users against the legal changes that have allowed law enforcement to physically force someone to provide biometric credentials. By default MS just provides biometric auth to make it easier to log in to your system.
People always say this but there is no real relationship there. When hardware vendors add security technologies to the hardware, the major third party operating systems add support to use it pretty much immediately, and in many cases before the hardware even ships because the hardware vendor publishes the documentation ahead of time.
Try to name something where Apple was the first to support something (by a non-trivial amount of time) not because they were the first to add hardware support but because they released the combination of hardware and software in the time between when e.g. Intel or Qualcomm added hardware support and when Linux or Windows added software support to use it.
