I can’t blog 24 hours a day, and I saw the news late last night that Apple had pulled down the support page that I linked to yesterday, saying that the page was old and outdated and that OSX contained features which made it resilient against viruses and exploits.
Apple made several good arguments about why antivirus software wasn’t necessary and could be detrimental to performance on the mac because antivirus software tends to be fairly intensive and hogs system resources that users could be using to get things done.
It’s a fair statement, and if the design of their OS is any indication, I’d have to say that Apple is probably fairly thorough, but I believe that end users do stupid things like, just a shot in the dark here, surf porn sites. If they aren’t surfing porn sites, then they are doing things like looking for freeware software, and I have a love for the open source community and free software myself, but there are unsavory characters out there that will use that to take advantage of unsuspecting computer owners who don’t know any better.
In these situations, I really think that the loss of cpu time and system resources are worth it to have that user running antivirus software.
