Snow Leopard Shipping With Anti-Malware Protection Comments

I worked in the Windows Group at MS from WFW 3.11 through XP. I switched to Mac about a year ago and love it, thought I still have a PC for gaming of course. :-) Reading the features of the upcoming Snow Leopard make me sit back and laugh at how far behind MS is in the OS game... and the concept of simply polishing, sharpening, improving, and slimming what you already have as opposed to simply creating a whole new monster every few years? Yeah, I'm sure MS will be getting onto that product release model any day now. I was there during the decade that saw MS shift from a product-driven environment to one driven by marketing... it's one of the reasons I left. It just wasn't fun anymore.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html

This is more a protection against Trojans which all operating systems are susceptible too, OSX has to date had no widespread outbreaks of viruses so IMO there is still no need to use an Anti-Virus product although anything protecting against Trojans is always a good idea no matter what OS you use.

Wow Caliban, and you think Apple isn't all about marketing? Have you watched one of their recent ads? Talk about hyperbole. Did you come up with that, or was the cheque by Steve Jobs enough?

10% of the market makes you an non-target to most malware authors. It's simply not worth the time. I'm not disputing they might not need anti-virus protection - I'm disputing the reasons. It's not because it's 'secure', as has been shown by the numerous vulnerabilities that have surfaced, it's because it's irrelevant.

In fact, the vulnerabilities underscore it - despite them being there, they've rarely been taken advantage of. It's the equivalent of a burglar seeing an open door and saying 'nah, not worth the time'.

This is not a statement about how good or not good OXS is. Just some reality on the world of malware. If Macs suddenly had 50% of the market place, there would be a scramble to write anti-virus software and we'd be hearing about how many macs are part of the bot nets.

Caliban - the interesting thing is that joe blow on the street isn't laughing or crying about new features in OSX. They don't care. Nor do most of them care how Windows 7 or Vista was written. For most of them, the price is the issue and as long as apple continues to charge a 'branding' fee, it's going to hurt them. Most people hardly use any of the fancy features.

Personally, I can't stand apple as a company any more than MS. They are not more honest than microsoft or any less out to make a buck at the users expense - they simply do it differently. Anyone that can't see that is simply suffering from fanboism.

I have no love of microsoft either - it's what my clients use so it's where I write my software. Again, that 10% thing - my choice is to write software on an OS that has 80%+ of the deskstops or 10%. That's an easy decision. The day macs have relevant chop of the _corporate_ desktop market, I'll start writing software for them.

My Snow Leopard copy shipped today, hope it arrives tomorrow - ooh, the excitement ;)

@Doc

I can only assume you were working as the tea boy considering you appear to have missed the complete re-write of the kernel between XP and Vista.