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For many years Macintosh enthusiasts (some may call them fan boys and fan girls) have extolled upon the virtues of the Macintosh operating system over Windows. One of these much touted virtues is the lack of malware for the operating system. It is a well-known fact that Windows is susceptible to attack from viruses, Trojans, spyware, etc., and that Mac OS is not. Well in recent months this has changed, people are now writing malware targeting the fortress of Apple.
This month a particular piece of malware was released into the wild, one that Windows users are very familiar with. This malicious code (called Mac Defender, Mac Security, and Mac Protector) poses as an anti-virus program that shows your system to be infected by malware and offers to clear it up for you, for a price. In reality the malware IS the program and it is charging you to remove itself. If you use Windows you know about these scams and have learned to avoid them. Now Mac users have to learn the same safe browsing habits and not to click on anything that pops up.
This is actually a good thing for Apple. Why is malware good for an operating system company you ask? Let me tell you. People who write malicious code such as malware typically only target software that is widespread and used by a large group of people. In the past, Mac OS wasn’t usually targeted because of its smaller market penetration. Being targeted by malware such as this is a sign that Mac OS is becoming more main stream which implies that it is doing very well.
Apple has been dominating the mobile market lately so much that it is easy to lose sight of its laptop and desktop market. Apple has also been making huge strides in these two markets with its Mac book and desktop computers. Since they have swapped to using Intel chipsets they have taken off with many people who before avoided them. Not only has their hardware taken many huge leaps forward, Mac OS itself is a high quality piece of software. Now based on a Linux kernel, Mac OS is compatible with a number of popular programs and is also very user friendly. Many people love it because it just works for what they want to do and it looks great.
I still personally dislike the Mac OS experience immensely, but it gets my full respect. I think it is a very good piece of software and I have no problem recommending it to friends who just don’t want to deal with their computer and want to do a limited number of common tasks. These people tend to only browse the internet, write documents, and watch movies. Macintosh computers do these tasks with a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part, and for these people, its perfect. This is not to say that Macs are limited in many other respects. I have one friend who’s company does a lot of software development, and they use only Macs (mostly because their software is written for Linux and Macs have great tools for that since they are based on a Linux kernel). The multimedia community has been using Mac computers for many years now and there are very high end, mature applications developed for just this purpose that industry professionals swear by.
All in all, Apple is finally gaining traction to compete with Microsoft. As consumers, this can only be good for us as each company strives to improve themselves to compete for our business. Look what it has already accomplished for Windows, Windows 7 is a phenomenal piece of software, and if you have used it you can tell that they used Mac OSX as their model. It is a great time to be a computer consumer.
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