[weaksauce]

I think OS X had a somewhat more secure core than windows historically because of the unix heritage but updates to core packages came in slower than for *nix distributions. from what I recall apple lagged in some of the security upgrades that windows implemented like address space layout randomization and some other techniques because windows had been hit hard with vulnerabilities. There is no good measure of absolute security levels between apple and windows that I am aware of... all the studies I have seen have been somewhat flawed.

I disagree with the money analysis... there's a reason those spam emails from a Nigerian prince contain intentional misspellings; it's to act as a filter to filter out the people that would not fall for the scam so as to not waste the time of the scammer. Higher levels of affluence correlate(not cause of course) with higher levels of education[1] so it's probably a less effective target just on that point alone. I do agree that Ransomware will be a more lucrative form of malware on OS X per 100 machines infected though for your reasoning. More money, more valuable data, more incentive to get the decryption key.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-gr...