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What are the top reasons Macs are much less likely to get viruses/worms/trojans?

They always say that one of the most important advantages of Macs is that no viruses are written/coded for them. What is the reason behind it? Is it so difficult or impossible to code a virus on Mac?

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Dupe superuser.com/questions/120664/… – Nifle Mar 27 '10 at 9:50
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closed as exact duplicate by Nifle, Arjan, random♦ Mar 27 '10 at 10:06

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

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Market share.

Pretty much those two words. Heard of Pwn2Own? Apple's software goes down very, very quickly.

Put yourself in the shoes of a malware writer: would you rather target an operating system used by countless corporations and end users, or an operating system that is mainly used by individuals and hardly at all for businesses?

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Another reason is the feature, shared by all Unix systems, is normal users have limited rights, so they can only infect themselves, not the whole system, and infections are much easier to see and remove. This is what Microsoft is doing UAC for in Vista and later - it has the same effect of limiting the scope of infection.

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..."the other"? You know we're not a forum, right? Answers might not appear in the order they were posted. :-) – Arjan Mar 27 '10 at 9:56
And when there's a 3rd answer posted here... :P – zhwang Mar 27 '10 at 9:59
While defense in depth can help the average home use won't care and it doesn't have much effect. If they want to see dancing bunnies, they will do anything to see dancing bunnies, as usual. Entering a password is just a minor hurdle. – Joey Mar 27 '10 at 11:32
Edited opening as per Arjan – Bobby Mar 28 '10 at 8:46
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