> They were not "coasting" on anything.

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.