DrSagacity wrote:
Of course you should get anti-virus for your Mac.
Not necessarily. It depends on what you are doing, and whether or not you have concerns about malware which affect other platforms. Note that 99.4% of all known malware is for the Windows platform.
It's safer.
No. Several antivirus system, for both Mac and Windows (Norton and McAffee, I'm looking at
you) are more dangerous than many types of malware. In particular Norton and McAfee (formerly known as Virex on the Mac platform) are
much more dangerous than almost all Mac malware since 1998. Both of them can and have destroyed data on Macs; NAV has destroyed entire hard disk volumes.
The cost of anti-virus is largely insignificant
Anyone who actually pays for Mac AV has money to waste. Sophos and Clam are free and work as well or better than pay AV.
and the cost if your computer gets infected can be very significant (in terms of both time to fix and loss of data).
There are no, none, zero, Mac viruses. There are a few Trojans. The last serious Mac malware was the autostart worm of 1998. The threat is minimal.
There is technically nothing about OSX that makes it less vulnerable.
Incorrect. Certain design decisions make it harder to create some types of malware for OS X. It is not a coincidence that the last major Mac malware appeared in 1998... just before OS X was released.
The biggest detractor at this time is just market share. Viruses don't typically target 5% of the market.
Doubly incorrect.
1 When the autostart worm arrived, the Mac OS had considerably less than 5% of the market. The autostart worm wasn't the only malware to arrive in 1998, merely the last and more widespread. (SevenDust, for example, was another malware variant which was active in 1998.) There was a point when despite the Mac having considerably less marketshare than Windows or DOS, there were nearly as many types of malware infections for Macs as for WIndows/DOS. There have been malware attacks on platforms with considerably less than Mac marketshare. The marketshare argument it totally bogus, and those wishing to be taken seriously should not use it.
2 The Mac OS has considerably more 5% of the market.
If you surf the web responsibly
Drive-by malware does not as yet exist for Macs, but it does exist for Windows. And no amount of 'responsible surfing' will defend against that.
and you don't open email from people you don't know (or suspicious email from people you do know). . .you will be fine without it.
Another bogus argument. Certain specific email clients, all of them for Windows, allowed the automatic loading of executables if sent in an email. And those clients have mostly fixed that behavior. If you turn off HTML on a Mac client you cannot be affected by an email payload unless you take steps to open and run the payload.
