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"My point was that there hasn't been an actual virus or worm."

There is so much contradictory information it's hard to tell what's true, I actually do hear about mac viruses, look them up and they even have names like "OSX/Leap-A" which was propagated through vulnerabilities in jpeg decoders.

Saying that macs have no viruses is kinda wishful thinking IMHO.

"I haven't had to deal with/worry about AV crap, rootkits, keyloggers, etc. since 2003 myself when I ditched the lovely Windows world."

Most of us (edit: technically knowledgeable) on windows didn't have to deal with malware on our own systems, but rather we had to clean out the systems of friends who were careless.

The vast majority of windows malware is caused by unsafe user practices such as downloading and running software from untrusted sources such as emails or web pages. Is this a hit against the windows experience? It sure is.

However, to make a fair comparison, what does apple do to protect the same careless users on a mac? If they were equally targeted on macs, aren't they potentially even more vulnerable there without A/V?

If we eliminate malware which is the "user's fault", then windows is actually fairly safe these days.

Remember, it was mac-os and not windows which was exploited with a zero day email exploit in the pwn2own contest last year.


Granted, I'm taking the position of devil's advocate here. I'm not a fan of MS products, they've dragged their users through hell over and over again with shoddy software and IE/activex/WGA crap. But all of that is no excuse not to evaluate apple objectively, they need to clean up their backyard too.

Edited 2011-03-04 01:32 UTC