99.9% of things reported (and even those are not that many to begin with) are trojans. So, Mac viruses are like the Yeti, they might well exist, but very few people have seen them in real life.

It's not just market share either. OS8/9 had several viruses with 1/5 the market share OS X has now.

If one considers that OS X is basically NeXTStep, and essentially a UNIX, do one really sees many viruses in UNIX systems? What I'm getting at is that the "administrator privileges by default", "can fuck with any file on the system" feature of Windows --up to Windows XP, which is where viruses really reigned, was not part of OS X from the beginning.

So, at worst, OS X since 10.0 was as secure as Windows Vista, which was not a swiss cheese OS like, say, Windows 98. Plus, OS X didn't have Active X, either, and used a custom PDF viewing (Acrobat is another common attack vector in Wintels).

Now, with the eviction of Flash and Java plugins as the default, and several other techniques (sandboxing, ASLR, signatures, etc), things will get even better.

How is Flashback a trojan? Also what percentage of new Windows malware over the past few years do you think are "viruses" according to your definition?

Am I the only one sick of the pedantic quibbling and nitpicking over the word "virus" in every Apple malware story when everyone knows that viruses really mean modern malware in this context in general parlance and not really floppy bootsector or executable file viruses of the 90s? Anti"viruses" try to defend against all types of malware, so making a huge distinction here doesn't really help the discussion.

I can almost hear the computer saying "I'm sick dickface....I don't care what you call it."