Apple Mac PC

[Muffy]

I've been informed that if you use an Apple Mac pc, you do not need any anti-virus or firewall installed.
does anyone know this to be factual?

[Constance]

Actually you don't need it either with a normal PC, that's just some additional safety measures. But if you know what you're doing and keep your system up to date, there's no real need for it.

Now, that doesn't mean Macs are invulnerable to virus and other attacks, far from it, but since there are very few people using it compared to the "PC running Windows" quantity, there are very few virus made to work under MacOS.

[locustfurnace]

The reason why Microsoft Windows is largely vulnerable to virus attacks is due to the way Microsoft designed the OS, without any real security in mind.
They did not use user group permission levels, instead they basically allowed for any user to do anything to the system. Such as deleting crucial system files.
Viruse coders learned this and used it to their advantage.
Nowadays, Microsoft is trying to add back in this security level, which they never used before. So its difficult adding it back into all those lines of code, not to mention to get MS Windows computer users to use these secure levels.

The reason that Apple's OS is more immune to these issues of malware, is as Constance pointed out, there are fewer users for one. but thats not simply the only reason.

OS X is built upon a very secure operating system, called FreeBSD. Which has had secure user levels since it was first created in the 70's. UNIX is very secure and immune to system wide levels of virus attacks, due to the very nature of the systems design.

This design is present in all the BSD's, OS X, Linux. Which makes them more difficult to infect with virus. Since you need special root access and passwords to install programs in system levels. Without, the permission or password, a virus could only infect the users files, not the system. Ofcourse, there are exceptions, such as exploiting code or incorrect chmods applied by a user on a file.

Apple's OS X is less vulnerable because fewer people use it, but mostly because it is built upon a UNIX/BSD base.