Researcher: Apple antivirus advice 'big to-do about nothing'

And now we see the downside of the move to Intel.

Part of what kept Macs near-virus-free for decades was that they used CPUs (first Motorola 680x0s, later Motorola and IBM PowerPCs) that fewer wannabe hackers knew how to program on the machine-language level. And with their smaller market share, the effort needed to learn a new CPU architecture and machine language was simply not worth it for such hackers.

By switching to Intel Cores and Xeons that use the x86 instruction set and architecture, this substantial learning curve has been removed from the equation. A great many more hackers know x86 machine-language programming than know all other CPU architectures and their ML codes combined!

Yes, the move to Intel had its upsides: Motorola and IBM simply weren’t following through with their promises of faster PowerPCs. While Intel had gone through a dark spell of the Pentium 4 (especially the NetBurst architecture version) which was one of the least efficient CPUs ever made by anyone, coming out with the Pentium M (actually a throwback to the Pentium 3 architecture, with the Pentium 4 SSE2 instructions added — in general, a Pentium 4 at a given clock speed would be matched or even beaten by a Pentium M clocked a full gigahertz slower! A 1.4GHz Pentium M roughly matched a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 in actual performance, for instance!) and the Core, Core², and now Core i7 CPUs derived from the Pentium M architecture made all the difference, jumping them well ahead of AMD and even, in many respects, the PowerPC, in terms of actual performance per clock speed.

But Apple should maybe have given more thought to this downside of using a CPU family that nearly every hacker worthy of the name already knew the ins and outs of. Their relative immunity to malware was one of their biggest selling points, and now it’s greatly weakened.

It used to be true that more new malware came out every day for Windows than had ever existed for the Mac (all the way back to and including the LISA)!

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