chuns wrote:
I had always believed that Macs were 'safer' than PCs because of technical reasons
That's true. Pretty much everything you hear about security with respect to Apple products is because of social and financial reasons. There is big, big money in keeping people in fear. Many people have made it their careers to spread misinformation with an #apple tag because they know that nothing brings the clicks like Apple does. Did you know that Apple's biggest competitors literally have entire divisions dedicated to hacking Apple products, in the "public interest", course.
From what you, and your predecessors in this thread, have implied would I be exposed to the same risk, with or without anti-virus and other 'protections'?
No. Using third party antivirus puts you at additional risk. If literally the only bad thing in the world were Mac malware, then maybe it might be a good idea to have some protection from it. But low-quality software causes many times more problems for Mac users that malware ever has. And of that low-quality software, nothing is lower in quality, more deeply embedded into the operating system, more difficult to remove, or causes more problems than "security" products. The cure is far worse than the disease.
As a home user I don't relish the thought of having to get somebody to salvage my records in the event of an attack.
What kind of attack? Do you want to try a fun exercise? Try to find out exactly what Mac malware actually does. You'll hear a lot about exploits, zero-days, command controls, RATs, rootkits - it goes on and on. But really, what does it do? Simple question.
On other platforms, the answer is easy. For Windows, it is open season for ransomware. With all the school boards, hospitals, and city governments of the world, all running Windows, their only defence is simply the vast number to be hacked. How to decide which one to attack?
For Linux, it is theft of personal and financial information. All of your bank data, your government data, your medical data, everything about you is sitting on a Linux server somewhere. Again, the only protection is the vast amount of data to be hacked. Where to start? Which unencrypted Amazon Web Services container to download? At least AWS assigns these resources with randomly-generated identifiers. You have to download 37 GB just to find out what's on it. And there are several million to pick from. For this data, I'm sure you've already been hacked multiple times, just like the rest of us. And yet, everyone is so worried about their Macs?
If the risk is more or less the same, I won't bother renewing next year, as I don't suppose they will refund me now!!
It doesn't really matter. Whether you pay or not, you probably won't be able to uninstall it without wiping your entire hard drive. When you restore, make sure to restore only user data and user accounts. Do not restore any applications, software, or "other files". You can then manually reinstall only the apps you really want.
