What a week!  First it was the Macbook battery support document and how Apple just wants to save you power. Then there’s this.  Apple, for the first time since they decided to take on Microsoft in the modern era of personal computing, has admitted that anti-virus isn’t such a bad idea.

The knowledge article reads like an advertisement, complete with links to the the Apple Store for their recommended anti-virus software.  But the truth remains, Apple has stopped campaigning against Microsoft by using the virus immunity argument it started with in 2006.  As Apple Insider notes, their current campaign makes no mention of the immunity to virus but rather OSX “resists most viruses”.  But because of the relatively low market share of OSX and coupled with the lack of WareZ being used on the platform, viruses aren’t likely to spread very quickly.  There also hasn’t been a lot of hackers out there trying to develop viruses for OSX either and why would you?  If you can code for a windows machine and get 500K of users infected, why bother with a minimal penetration OS that will require a super high percentage of infection to see numbers like that.

Either way, it’s another first for Apple, and maybe this will lead to a built-in anti-virus in Snow Leopard?  Again, don’t hold your breath.

Careful Mac, you could be next!

UPDATE: Gizmodo pointed out that there is a previous version to this tech paper that was dated in 2007 and the current update is a matter of updating recommended software versions.  Still worthy of note that Apple has been preaching virus free for a while but yet such document exists – cover your butt is right!

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