FYI for the non Geek Sailors and Apple Lovers

And just last weekend my brother in law was trying to tell me that people only mess up Windows and nobody ever bothers to mess up Apple.

Most Mac fanboys believe, wrongly, their systems are impervious to viruses. The truth is, up to now, the established base of Mac computers is too small to be attractive to virus writers. If Mac market share continues to grow incidences of Mac viruses will increase.

Pitiful piece of garbage that has to get his kicks spreading malware. To do damage for no purpose. Pitiful pieces of garbage. My dogs have a better life.

This old chestnut... Care to quote market share off the top of your head?


It's currently about 10% - somewhere around 10 million sold a year. 10% is statistically significant no matter how you slice it. Market research also puts Mac buyers in a higher earning demographic than PC buyers (which makes sense, considering you can pick up a PC bundle and get onto your local dial-up provider for about $300... not many people in the trailer park will shell out $3k for a laptop). A new PC every Christmas? Sure. A new Mac every 3-5 years? That's about right.

For thieves, that's a lucrative target. But what they can't penetrate in quality they make up for in quantity by going after susceptible Win boxes.

If you notice a common thread, the "viruses" for OSX are not viruses at all, but trojan horses, and are generally as easy as rebooting your system to get rid of. Linux being the basis of OSX, and Linux also being the OS of choice for the world's supercomputers, as well as the choice OS of the people writing the viruses, one would expect to find a lot more Linux exploits. But there aren't.

And that's not because there's no value in exploiting Linux security holes. It's because there aren't really any holes to exploit, and those that exist are patched at least as quickly as they are found. The beauty of open source.

I'm not a fanboy. I've done my years in PC system and network support. I've got Macs in the field with my people and I use one for most of my work as well. They are a much better system from firsthand experience. I would not have said the same before the Intel-chip/OSX generation came along in 2006, when I made the jump.

Recently I've been working in a business that is mid-migration to Windows 7 from XP. Guess what? It's still NT behind it all... without the NT reliability. 15+ year old software with new pretty pictures facing the user. 15+ year old vulnerabilities and weaknesses. 15+ year old problems and 15+ year old patches. 25+ year old memory management and file naming conventions. But they're cheap and ubiquitous, so people put up with the trouble.