Chas, that statement is a little disingenuous and quite frankly, I'm tired of seeing it repeated ad nauseum on this forum. No, there are no "viruses" in the truest sense of the word, but there is malware.
So you agree that the statement is true, but have conveniently forgotten that I myself often append that very sentiment to it.
The truth is, there some (very limited) malware threats to OS X. The seasoned Mac user will know how to avoid them, but to tell switchers that are new to the platform that they couldn't possibly have a need for an AV product does them a disservice.
Just because I don't re-summarize everything I've *ever* said about malware and AV programs (I have in fact recommended ClamXAV numerous times, go check my posts!) every time I post doesn't mean that it's okay to infer that I don't believe this because I don't mention it in a specific instance. You're also rather liberally re-interpreting what I said into something I did not, in fact, say.
Most laymen don't understand the difference between a "virus", a "trojan", adware, spyware, malware, etc.
Most laymen should learn then, don't you think? Otherwise it causes enormous amounts of confusion and fosters ignorance. That's why I prefer to be clear that there are NO viruses for the Mac. Once that's understood, then people can educate themselves about the other types of threats, including by reading many of my posts on such topics, including the stickied one linked in my signature.
I often but not ALWAYS go on to mention that malware exists and here's what to do about it. But I don't write the entire chapter and verse every time, neither do you. It's just like you leaving out that there are no Mac threats that don't involve *active user participation* in order to work in your comment on malware above -- did you do that on purpose? No, of course you didn't -- you just didn't mention it this particular time.
we have a very well written FAQ that you can point people toward
Which I do routinely. And it IS indeed very well-writtten and comes to exactly the same conclusions I routinely reiterate.
Nobody's being obtuse here -- but you've gotten off the track of this thread. The thread is about a guy whose wife was pressured into buying an unnecessary "anti-virus" product that then CAUSED problems on his system until he removed it. All my comments in this thread have been focused on that.
You've confused this discussion for a larger discussion about malware. In those sorts of threads, I've included information about malware threats and what to do about them (my recommendations generally involve education over different AV software but that's not relevant to THIS thread).
THIS discussion is about the worthlessness of poorly-written anti-virus software and what the OP should do about that. That some anti-virus software can ALSO defend against SOME types of malware is, IMHO, a separate discussion which the OP may or may not ask about and if so will get loads of useful info from you, me and others either from previous threads or expanded new comments.
