Apple's long-standing paternalistic and often approach flies in the face of this new "," as it's been called. The company's longtime reliance on secrecy and its "we know what's best for you" attitude isn't going to be a sustainable one over the years.

An Unsustainable Strategy

Same goes for the inner workings of Apple's technology, which has traditionally been presented to consumers from on high as a "black box" to be used but not understood.

That's had significant security implications, as we saw with the arrival of , which made it clear once and for all that the company's "security through obscurity" strategy just doesn't work.

Apple's relatively small desktop market share has protected it there so far, but if it hopes to grow in the future, it will increasingly find itself a target for malware, just as Windows has. Unfortunately, because both are closed source, only the companies themselves--with the inevitably finite set of resources at their disposal--can fix any vulnerabilities that arise.