Viruses and PCs
Who’s to say if figures are accurate, but if the true figure is only 1/10 of the 8 million PCs infected, it still is a solid reason to choose the Mac or Linux instead, as I wrote in October 2006 in Mac or PC — Making a Sensible Choice.
Is the latest worm a test? Who’s to say there aren’t 10 more or 100 more like it, of a more destructive nature, lying in wait, to be used in times of conflict? Viruses are a national security threat, and the idea that governments don’t have crack teams of programmers thinking about crippling the communications infrastructure of opponents via viruses seems farfetched. Combining viruses along with “bot” networks of millions of PCs for denial of service attacks could prove extremely potent.
Macs are not immune from viruses, and sooner or later a real threat will emerge, but so far the security threats to Mac OS X, a unix-based OS, have been a non-issue by comparison to Windows.
It’s a shame that Apple can’t get its act together and bring the price down for people who’d love to use Mac OS X, but can’t afford the price. While at the high end Apple is actually quite competitive when similar quality and feature sets are compared, the under $1000 mark is an area Apple just doesn’t serve (Mac Mini doesn’t count once all the required extras are added).
See my Mac Performance Guide for selecting and configuring a Mac, or sprucing up your existing one.
