While Apple's marketing continues to tout itself as more secure than Microsoft, the reality is very different.

This week the outfit released a record-breaking security update that patched nearly 90 vulnerabilities in both its own code and the third-party applications it bundles with its Tiger and Leopard operating systems. Now that analysts have had a chance to look at the sort of holes that Apple is plugging it is clear that all is not well in Apple land.

The update's total patch count nearly is nearly half of all the fixes Apple released in 2007, which saw 40 or more bugs patched. It also followed huge fix of Apple's Safari browser which patched 13 vulnerabilities.

While some of the fixes are for the third-party applications bundled with OS X, 18 of the 30 components or applications patched were Apple's own.

In Tiger, bugs were found in the AFP Client, Apache, Application Firewall, ClamAV, CUPS, Emacs, Help Viewer, Image Raw, Kerberos, mDNSResponder, OpenSSH, pax archive, PHP, Podcast Producer, Preview, Printing, System Configuration, UDF, Wiki Server and X11.

The open-source ClamAV antivirus scanner included with Apple's server operating system received patches for nine bugs. Tiger also had holes in the AFP Client, AFP Server, Apache, AppKit, CFNetwork, ClamAV, CoreFoundation, CoreServices, CUPS, curl, Emacs, file, Foundation, Help Viewer, Kerberos, libc, notifyd, OpenSSH, PHP, System Configuration and X11 were patched.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment as it was laughing too much. X