"25 million machines running OS X isn't enough to tempt a virus writer to at least try? If you say so"
Source for that number?
According to this story the number is in the thousands ( 12,000 )
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2004/09/on_why_the_macs_small_populati.html
Uh, Drift? You REALLY believe there are only 12,000 Macs in use in the world??? .... that's funny. You continually display ignorance of the Mac computer. From your link:
On March 8th, 2004, eEye Digital Security discovered a vulnerability in ISS's BlackICE/RealSecure products. On March 9th, ISS released a patch for the vulnerability. On March 18th, eEye published a high-level description of the vulnerability. 36 hours later, Witty (Worm) was released into the wild. Within 45 minutes, every vulnerable machine was infected, about 12,000 machines in total. . . Witty only attacked computers running unpatched versions of BlackICE firewalls. It was released ten days after a fix for the vulnerability was issued. It only infected 12,000 hosts, but it did so in 45 minutes, or 4.45 hosts per second.
ISS's BlackICE/RealSecure Firewall runs on WINDOWS computers, not Macs. It infected 12,000 WINDOWS computers using BlackICE's firewall. The point of the article was that crackers wrote a virus that invaded a firewall on a Windows machine that was installed on only 12,000 computers. Not 12,000 Macs.
You want the source? Last January, Apple reported 19,000,000 OS X Macs were in use. They have sold an additional 6 milllion or so in the last year.
Popular Science did a scientific survey of computer users in the United States a couple of years ago and found that 14% of the respondents were using Macs... which translated into about 16,000,000 Macs. Consumer Reports found 16% Mac users in another unbiased survey of consumer computer users. The Software Publishers Association of America reported a year and a half ago that 18% of all software is purchased for Macs.
25,000,000 is probably on the outside edge of accuracy but 22 million would be real close.
Reality check, dude. According to Apple's 10K filed with the SEC, they sold 5.3 million Macs last quarter alone. But since your 12,000 number comes from 2004, we can compare that with the same 10K which says Apple sold almost 3.3 million Macs that quarter in 2004.