Well in 2006 when those ads were first being shown, XP was still the newest version of Windows and it had no privilege separation. As viruses that patched MBR sectors or system DLLs were extremely common, MacOS X was in fact "magically" (inherently) more secure since that vector of attack on a Mac would require a password prompt to elevate the program's privileges.

From then to this day, Mac viruses have been effectively non-existent in the wild. There have been some trojans and worms, but they can't rightfully be classified as viruses (no infection of other files).

That's probably false. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 2000 (from 1999) and you could define a "normal" user and a "power" user. Only when you needed to install something would you run as the power-user.

This all worked inside the same desktop session.

That maybe only 1% of the users (the "paranoid" ones) used it, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

By contrast, it seemed like owning a Wintel machine pretty much guaranteed you'd have issues unless you were utterly ruthless and/or didn't have any layman users browsing the internet to worry about.

Has that in fact changed since? I am no longer as familiar with the Windows side of things as I used to be, but I do know from experience that there's a very solid reason why this stereotype took root in the first place.

Not strange if you grasp the fact that malware is just a program that has elevated access.

For me it was strange how can Apple market their system as virus-free. Now that's ridiculous.

I just wonder what the vast userbase of uneducated people (seniors, teen bloggers, ironically education institutions, etc) who moved over to macs because they bought the lie will feel when they too later discover that the promises were a lie.

Because unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't have a battle hardened OS where security has been worked on systematically, for over a decade.

And I could have told you the same story years ago. I don't need blatantly obvious bugs like this one to back that claim.

You're also hilariously wrong about Microsoft having a supposedly "battle-hardened" OS where security has been worked on systematically. OS X is based on BSD Unix, where security has been worked on since the 1970s, before Microsoft even existed. OS X itself is now 15 years old.

I administer hundreds of Macs and PCs. I can objectively state that the PCs have about 10-50x as much issues with malware as the Macs have, and those issues are more severe and affect users and admins more. Everyone who manages both Macs and PCs in the enterprise is well-aware of this.

what? I thought they bought macs so we wouldn't need to give free tech support ;)

Not really. I've been using Macs for as long as I can remember (I'm 30), and in that entire time, I've only ever actually seen 2 pieces of malware myself (I've heard of others but never actually encountered them). One of them was the rather benign Merry Xmas Hypercard trojan from way back, which doesn't actually harm your computer, all it does is search for other hypercard stacks on your computer to infect, and if you open an infected stack on December 25th it will play sound and wish you a Merry Xmas. The other one was one of those Adware apps, I forget its precise name, and I didn't actually even see that, I talked with someone else on the phone who had it and walked them through the instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987 for removing it.

And just to note, the latter one isn't even a virus, because it's not self-replicating (the former one technically is, because it infects other stacks on the same computer, but it was pretty darn benign and did not rely on an OS security flaw to operate).

So yeah, there exists malware for the Mac, and there's more of it now than there ever has been in the past, but it's like a completely different universe from Windows malware. You pretty much have to go out of your way to hit this on the Mac.

As an aside, the first widely-spread Mac malware I ever heard of was spread via a pirated copy of iWork '09 being distributed on BitTorrent. Someone had altered the DMG to include the virus before uploading it. It was kind of funny hearing about people being infected because you knew the only way they could have done that was by trying to pirate iWork '09 (this was the only distribution vector). And even that apparently doesn't count as a "major" security threat because the Wikipedia page[1] for Mac Defender, which is dated to May 2011, describes Mac Defender as "the first major malware threat to the Macintosh platform", even though it wasn't even a virus it was just a trojan (and FWIW it didn't even require antivirus software to remove, Apple rolled out an automatic fix themselves, although it did take them a few weeks to do so).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Defender

For example, read through Adweek's summary of Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign, which Adweek calls the best ad campaign of 2000-2010:

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/apples-get-mac-complete-campai...

"PC has caught a virus and is clearly under the weather. He warns Mac to stay away from him, citing 114,000 known viruses that infect PCs. But Mac isn't worried, as viruses don't affect him."

"Trying to hide from spyware, PC is seen wearing a trench coat, a fedora, dark glasses, and a false mustache. He offers Mac a disguise, but Mac declines, saying he doesn't have to worry about such things with OS X."

"PC appears wearing a biohazard suit to protect himself from viruses and malware. He eventually takes mask off to hear Mac better, then shrieks and puts it back on."

"She has lots of demands, but her insistence that the computer have no viruses, crashes or headaches sends all the PCs fleeing"

I would define malware more simply as a program that does something the user doesn't want.