My daughter is an art/graphic design major and just got her brand new Macbook Pro, and is in the process of getting all the required software for school (Office, iWork, Adobe Cloud, etc...)
Never having had a Mac before, my question is:
What other software is essential? Does she need anti-virus/anti-malware software?
Originally posted by cranlsnThe link seemed to "hedge their bets" regarding this, saying "no you don't need it", but several people in the comments disagree.
You don't *need* it, but it's not a bad idea. How's that for definitive?
My general feeling is that it's never a bad idea. About 4 years ago at my last job, we had a ton of problems - on Macs - with the Melissa/97 Word macro virus (which these days isn't really harmful as much as it is annoying). It was sent to us by another department, which also primarily used Macs. Some of the documents were passed via flash drive, so our email virus scanner didn't catch it.
It is always a good idea to have something - even if it's ClamAV (which I believe you can get for free through the app store or the website) - run occasional scans on your system. Even if you aren't as endangered with regards to viruses as Windows, you should have some idea as to what's on your system.
Having said that (and with all due respect to the Symantec folks), I found VirusBarrier to be a fairly affordable and decent scanner - although in the 4 years I've used, it's never caught anything, so... YMMV.
I've been having fun with my MacBook for almost a month, and the main software I've used is VLC for video playback - since iTunes or whatever their default media player doesn't support a number of codecs.
I've had great success with VLC on Windows platforms, but I just don't know how to make VLC my default video player on iOS.
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I wanted to buy a Mac. And so I listened to the experts, and waited until after MacWorld to buy said Mac, because that's when new products are usually announced. So when nothing was announced, I went and bought a Mac Mini about a three weeks ago.
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