The primary reason that Macs haven't been a target of virus/worm/trojan/hackers is that there are proportionately so few of them. I think somewhere aroun 5% of internet computers are Macs. The creeps who release the malevolent programs and so forth want to make a big splash. Hard to make a big splash with 5% of the 'puters.

OS-X is a UNIX shell. It comes with everything pretty well shut down except peripherals and during set-up you go through configurations decisions that establish firewall security. But I believe it should be about as vulnerable as any other Unix machine. At home I have a pswd protected router and both networked Macs are pswd protected.

Also, I get far fewer spyware installations on my home Macs than my office PC's. Probably the same reason.

Mac OS-X gives you a great shell that is very similar to the Mac OS-9 interface. But OS-X is a shell. You can get into the inner horror of Unix if that floats your boat. Its several obscure windows away and then you're in command-line heaven. I succesfully run the oOpen Source clone of Microsoft "Office" and find it reliable. It runs a bit slower than "Office", probably because I have an older G-3 which is about 3 generations behind top-shef Macs, and an even older PowerMac 6300 (1995). The older Mac runs OS-9, the last true Mac OS. The machines are running through the same router without a hitch.

The 6300 is just barely tolerable for internet. It's bus speed is way slower than my cable connection so images take a while to load and streaming vid, fahgettaboutit! But it's a very reliable old thing and runs plenty of kid's games and wordprocessor and such.

Someday I'm gonna buy a bleeding edge computer just to see what its like.

B