Mac OS is vulnerable to virus: Apple says yes and then no

The Mac zealots’ pride was recently dealt a hard blow when Apple published in an article that the Mac OS was also prone to virus and other malware attacks. In fact, in the article Apple advised its loyal fanbase to use popular antivirus tools from Symantec and McAfee.

So does that mean that the aura of the Mac OS has been destroyed and it has been brought down to the same level of mundaneness as Microsoft’s Windows family of operating systems? Well, not really. The fact of the matter is that the number of viruses in the wild for the Windows platform outnumber the ones for the Mac OS by quite a large factor. Also the ones that can potentially affect the Mac OS platform are relatively less damaging. Moreover the malware exploits on the Mac OS are not as popular as compared to the ones on the Windows platform. But does that make Mac OS immune to viruses? Of course not. No operating system is totally invulnerable. Nothing like that exists. But the level of vulnerability varies. The Mac OS was never immune to threats but less vulnerable. Those are two totally different things.

Nevertheless, Apple’s recent admittance dealt a serious blow to the bubble in which Mac fanboys usually prefer to exist. And Apple realized that. So what does it do? Simple, it deletes the line from the post and defends itself saying that it was from an old post. So that means the notion that the Mac OS was never vulnerable to virus attacks was wrong. It was very much threatened like the ordinary Windows operating system.

Kind of confusing I say. Can Apple come clean on this?