Being “malware-less” because of fanatically standing by a closed system might be great for the “Tall brained” morons that make up the Apple fanbase, but this damn thing is just an irritation for anyone who's capable of doing more than turning something on and off, e.g. the only advice any Apple advocate can give you is either “restore” or “turn it off and back on again.” Absolutely brilliant! I hope you guys didn't have to spend 4 years in school to figure that one out.

Actually, the Mac never had a “huge” marketshare. The Apple II managed 15% in 1984 while the Mac only ever captured a maximum of 11% (in 1991).
http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html

Of course the market is now far larger than back in the 80s and 90s and Apple is growing at rates three times that of the rest of the PC industry and is worth more than every other PC manufacturer and

As such, Apple's “making the whole widget” policy is making real dividends in the OS market and is doing even better in the smartphone market beating Windows Mobile, Palm and by the looks of things even RIM this quarter.

Also, remember that Android is at the mercy of the carriers and looks like being severely hobbled by the walled-garden policies of many of them – witness Verizon's forcing phone manufacturers to limit features that impinge on it's profit streams. Android may not be the panacea many are hoping for.

-Mart

The other thing that is greatly different this time around is that mobile phones are already mass consumer devices. Remember, PCs started out as business tools only, and only a few rich people had PCs at home. So MS was able to corner the business market, which is pragmatic and economically motivated above all else, with a product that was “good enough” and cheap. Once they owned big business, MS was able to penetrate in the home by convincing people that what they had at work had to be compatible with what they had at home. Recent Mac sales and surveys suggest that this notion no longer exists in most people's minds, and consumers, who are style and usability conscious above all else, are gravitating toward Apple products for personal use.

Android has three major obstacles in its path (and several other minor ones, too):

First, it has to win in Business over RIM, who has a commanding lead at the moment. Considering Google's “openness”, the security question is going to be a hard sell for them with IT professionals, who now spend most of their time with security concerns. They want a closed system they can control. Android won't provide it.

Second, Android has the same problem Microsoft as always had, in that it will be offering dozens of models with a large degree of variance in features. Not all Android phones will have touch screens. Not all of them will have motion sensors. They will have different screen resolutions, processors, etc. This makes it very hard for developers to make apps that work on all Android phones, and it confuses consumers when trying to purchase applications which will only be compatible with certain Android phones. Apple wins here in the consumer space big time.

Third, Google will have to compromise in the open-closed debate occasionally (as evidenced in the recent revelation that some developers are getting advance copies of SDK updates while others aren't). The more Google does this, the more it will lose its most vocal evangelists in the open-source community. Without them, there won't be a whole lot of people trumpeting the benefits of Android over iPhone.

if you can't answer the above then
you don't pass the smell test.

The iPhone, of course, is very much like the Mac. The development environment is the same. The core OS is the same.

I'll take the iPhone for the cleaner, quieter, mal-ware less environment that works.