Comments on: Apple deletes Mac antivirus suggestion

Apple removes statement to customers urging them to use antivirus software, saying that Macs are safe "out of the box."

[Elsimir]

I must point out that while yes 10s of millions of macs may seem like a lot and defeat the argument that you don't have sufficient exposure to make the effort worthwhile for hackers/virus writers, you fail to consider that there are billions of Windows based PCs in the world meaning that Mac use is still smaller than Windows by several orders of magnitude when relative effort is compared to relative gain for a malicious coder the Windows based machine still wins hands down.

I would also like to contend the 'studies showing that Mac users have higher average IQs and Earnings' argument from above, any of these studies will suffer from extreme bias in statistics purely because of the size difference in the user bases, i could gather every mac user for a survey and an equal number of windows users and not come anywhere close to a representative sample group for windows users.

As a small plug I would like to mention that William Gates III scored 1590/1600 on his SAT Test, an IQ of approximately 170.

As mentioned above Mac/Windows and *nix have no great architectural advantages with regards to computer security over one another. Its worth noting that the majority of attacks against windows computers are now caused by social engineering, and while yes no A/V will protect you from that aspect of the attack a decent one will prevent the application installed from running and delivering its payload.

[Mirelurk]

All studies are biases. Always in one way or another. Just based on sheer numbers windows users would average out between high and low IQ's. ....as a small plug...Billy Gates stole graphic user interface ideas and patented them behind others backs....but I guess that's just smart...1590 wow

[lekum]

Where has this "security by obscurity" nonsense come from?

[Mirelurk]

I do not understand why people think that just because the fact that there are less Macs out there that coders who would write viruses would not want to hack OSX. Why wouldn't you want the pub of writing the virus that destroyed all the Macs? Since none of them are running A/V programs, why not get all ten million or so at once? Maybe its just too difficult. The real fact is that most quote un-quote viruses(grouping all mal-ware type stuff here) exploit vulnerabilities in applications and not the operating system itself. Doesn't matter if you're running Vista/XP, OSX, Windows 95, if you give your bank account # to a fake website your screwed. Or if you downloaded a collection of MP3's loaded with trojans and installed them all, well good luck to you. Common sense is an amazing thing, however, it totally lacking in most people today...Everything needs to be patched sometimes, they are some very smart people looking for holes in everything, you go online, you take a risk period. Use a little common sense and think twice about that free software from piratebay...it might end up costing you. I love the war of operating systems. I am totally not sold on Vista...wasn't is just a Beta of Ventura anyways...Owned a G4 powerbook for about 5 years no A/V no problems,went through hell and back. Just got a new iMac totally love it. Once you switch you don't go back

[photoretouching]

It seems that Apple are getting a little arrogant. If cyber criminals can hack into secure sites, then it is only a matter oftime before they start attacking Mac osx.