One of the main reasons for the absence of viruses on the mac is the smaller market share of apple computers in the market. That is kind of common sense and used often in pro-Microsoft argumentations. Everbody seems to assume the amount of viruses for the mac will increase in the same way as they as they are gathering more and more market share. The same seems to be true for Firefox.

On the the assumption the main source of "evil-doers" is the the "axis of evil" you will find that the homelands of many of the virus coders are actually in economically weak areas. Creativity thrieves best under constraints, all kind of ever more secure bariers are circumvented with sometimes hard to grasp virtuosity. While they in general just don't deserve my respect for their doings, these virus coders definitly have my respect for their passion and technical excellence in fighting their way through the minefields of modern day security.

Anyhow, in economicly weak areas, the probalilty for joe coder to buy a taiwan PC clone are way higher than to fork over big amounts for a shiny new MacBook. And this will save Apple, for simply not having legions of underage virus coding experts to-be waiting to raid MacOSX land. This is to fact that they can't even afford to build the knowledge base in the first place.

Besides, good luck to Microsoft when trying to revoke Adminstrator rights from their employees with their in-house Vista release. Separating User and Adminstrator rights CLEANLY was a problem Unix solved approx. 30 years ago, at least long before i started with it, and that was in 1986.