[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

" Despite popular belief all you Apple users aren't immune to hackers or malware attacks."

Blue, I really don't have a dog in the fight, since RightOnTheLeftCoast Manor has PCs running everything from WinME to Win7, several Linux machines, several Macs, and a Sun Sparcstation. So all I have to work from is experience:

My two teenage sons had Windows laptops for several years. And I was resigned to wiping those machines to bare metal every few months due to contagions they'd pick up which would bring their machines to their knees despite costly antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, disk-cleaning, disk defrag, registry cleaning and similar utilities. No strategy I was able to implement would keep those machines uninfected.

So in disgust I got 'em both Mac laptops. And going on twelve teenager-years of use now, there hasn't been a single support incident. Not one.

Being an everyday XP user, I'm the first to say that there's nothing inherently wrong with using Windows. Insecure, maybe, but if you avoid gaming and music sites and (the scourge of my wife's Windows laptop) cute "free" animated cursor downloads, you'll be fine. But neither does a Windows machine compare with a Mac in real-world security, robustness, reliability or usability. Today's Macs are marvelous accomplishments. And though I'd expect to pay significantly more for a best-in-class product, they're quite reasonable when ranked against machines of comparable capabilities.

[Blue Highway]

It is well known there are less attacks directed towards Macs because of the limited amount of marketshare of users.

That said, I never have a problem unless I were to be frequenting questionable website, which I stay away from.