"PCs, not Macs" - snake oil straight from apple?

if you haven't heard about it yet, apple has produced a bunch of commercials comparing the mac to the pc and one of them gives the distinct impression that macs don't get viruses...

of course mac computers are not immune to viruses, they had viruses in the past and a little over a month ago they got their first osx virus (osx/leap.a) so the mac's virus immunity is definitely the stuff of fiction, which makes the commercial in question all the more damning...

you see it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that when the average person hears the dialog:

PC - last year there were 114,000 known viruses for pcs
MAC - pcs, not macs

they're going to get the impression that macs don't get viruses, which is false...

but do you think a false advertising charge is going to hold up in court? maybe not... if you look closely at what is actually being said, there are no unambiguously false statements... the mac guy could have simply been saying the virus figures for the pc apply only to the pc and not the mac, which is true - or he could habe been saying that the viruses for the pc are for the pc and not the mac, which is also currently true...

the mac guy was awefully ambiguous, and the commercial walked a very fine line between giving a false impression and making an actual false statement - just enough to get the benefits without any legal problems... and that's what makes me think it was intentional and why i have no qualms about calling it snake oil (rather than just an accident)... you see you don't have to explicitly lie in order to be a snake oil peddlar, you just have to make people believe something that isn't true in order to make your product look better and that is exactly what apple is doing...

one of the biggest security problems in the mac world, especially in light of all the vulnerabilities that have been uncovered recently and proof of concept malware that's been developed, is denial... mac users don't see security as being a problem they need to worry about and apple is actively fostering this delusion with the commercial in question and with statements like that of bud tribble that macs are designed to be run "without the need for firewalls or additional security software"... in that sense, apple is being part of the problem rather than part of the solution...