Fortune columnist: ‘get a Mac’ to thwart viruses; right answer for the wrong reasons

“Your computer suddenly seems constipated. Then, at midnight, it turns into a zombie and attacks the Pentagon. Men in black come and take away your family. You may have a worm, or a virus, or a Trojan horse,” posits Peter Lewis for Fortune.

Lewis writes, “Solution: Get a Macintosh. (The big reason Macs don’t get targeted by virus writers is that Windows-based computers offer a more target-rich environment: There are at least 20 PCs out there for every Mac.) If you do depend on Windows, use protection. Do two things: First, click on the start tab and get familiar with ‘Windows Update.’ It’s part of Microsoft’s Trusted Computing initiative. You can trust that each week there’ll be a new software patch to download so that you can fix a newly discovered hole in Windows.” Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Even though he arrives at the correct solution, “Get a Macintosh,” Lewis perpetuates two myths along the way. See the related MacDailyNews articles, Shattering the Mac OS X ‘security through obscurity’ myth and 3 percent is a false stat; Mac holds ’10 to 12 percent of the market for personal computers’ for more information.

27 Comments

  1. Ok, first of all, wintel machines are not expensive to upgrade at all, I built a 2.4ghz machine in one shot for about $490 give or take. It isn’t any big surprise if you find out one kind of RAM works better than another, or this board doesnt support that FSB, that is, it’s no big surprise if you’ve done your research, which anyone about to spend more than $100 oughta be doing. Second, Macs are awesome machines, I’ve had a 800mhz Imac since a good while back and it has yet to become to slow to bear, and it’s still pretty stable, except for one major incedent that caused the whole system to go down…My only problem with Mac’s, they dont have ANY support for most software I use, and the Mac versions of a couple titles are RIDICULOUSLY priced. So it just isnt practical for me. And I wont even go into the !@#$ itunes thing.

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