apple question

My friend bought a macbook a couple weeks ago and he keeps telling me to buy one because they don't get viruses. Is this true? (i'v never owned a mac)

 

Well, it's true in that there are less viruses for Macs, mostly due to their small percentage of the market. No OS is completely "virus-proof," of course, but the number of exploits/viruses for the BSD/Linux platforms is comparatively small, mostly because there's not much to be gained by writing them vs. Windows viruses/spyware. Whether that's a good reason to buy one is, of course, a matter of opinion.

 

There is less virus/spy/spamware for macs because the majority of the people use windows.

this DOES NOT MEAN that macs are more secure then windows, it just means that less hackers program hacks for macs since they are a minority.

there are virus for macs, just less.

also there are great free windows anti virus programs like antivir that do the job great.

you should not let the OS decide what laptop you get because there is no physical difference between a mac and a windows OS system anymore

any "mac" can run windows and any window pc can run mac OS.

 

(moving to Apple forum, you may get more help here)

 

Yup, theres no free roaming viruses for OS X, Linux or Unix platforms.
But there are other reasons to like OS X besides that. Basically, it's a very user friendly GUI to a Unix kernal.

 

Not legally.

 

lol

i wouldn't let legality stop me though

though i have to warn that if you don't know what you're doing, you can screw up your computer very badly (ie screw up bios/the mac boot up thingy)

 

The lack of vulnerability can also be partially attributed to the fact that security on *nix based operating systems is increased by the fact that they tend to be more "compartmentalized" (for lack of a better term) so that even if viruses make their way in they are a bit less likely to be able to bring your entire system down completely. It also seems the majority of the few pieces of malware that exist for OS X rely on the user willingly downloading and running something through some degree of social engineering, so just like with Windows a large part of security is dependent on good practices on the user's part. However this is not true in all cases as there are a handful of things that can autorun themselves and take advantage of a system vulnerability without user intervention, but these are very few and far between and Apple typically has stellar response times when it comes to patching these holes.

 

To say that Apple's security is based solely on market share is naive. I will grant that it may help, but OS X/UNIX is inherently more secure. One of the biggest reasons is that you can actually run as a limited user, which for anyone who has tried that in Windows knows, is nearly impossible with XP. Vista should fix this and many other issues. But to say OS X hs no viruses because they only hve so little market share is not looking at the story.

 

Very true, though it's easy to be brought into the line of thinking that it's due to market share. Though if there were enough people who wanted to write viruses for mac... well, I'm not sure how well they'd work. It's one thing to find exploits, but I'm not sure how well Unix exploits have been taken advantage off.

Any software you run on any OS could potentially cause security holes. Thats the biggest problem. Even Unix had problems wtih a hole in LDAP for a little while. but yeah, from what I've seen, Apple is very fast at patching security holes.