You might need to pay for MacOS antivirus in 2022. Yes, your Apple laptop or desktop does need some form of antivirus. Apple products are not immune from spyware, malware, and viruses. The belief that they were immune was the result of millions of dollars in Apple advertising highlighting that Microsoft Windows was the dominant OS in the desktop market. Viruses and malware written for Apple products are less common because Windows is still ~75% of the global market share in operating systems. Why write a virus for less that 15% of global operating systems.

The Glory Days

Back in the glory days when Apple was advertising that their products don’t get viruses, many of the antivirus providers offered a version of their products for MacOS for free. It was a tough sell back then; antivirus companies had to convince users the they actually needed their product when Apple advertising said they didn’t. Now the times have changed, Apple apparently recommends MalwareBytes, and most of the once free MacOS antivirus providers want between $25 and $50 dollars for a yearly subscription.

So now in 2022, we’re looking for antivirus, preferably for free. We’re accustomed to free. Sophos Home for free was great! It was free before, there must be free antivirus out there.

Price of Free

There IS free MacOS Antivirus. Hooray!

Oh, but it also comes with ads. Annoying pop-up ads, the type that wreck the deep focus you’re in. That’s Avira. If your antivirus has to be free and you want to pay with your precious attention, then Avira is the one for you.

It seems that the rest of the antivirus programs for MacOS are paid. By the way, modern MacOS antivirus come with unnecessary bloat, like VPN’s, browser plugins, and even cryptominers (Norton). VPN’s do have their uses, but for non-technical users they are mostly to induce paranoia and lessen the weight of one’s wallet. VPN’s should not be baked into antivirus. With Chrome blocking malicious/phishing sites, the plugins are largely unneeded. Yep, that awful malware for cryptomining that eats up your CPU and/or GPU cycles to make someone else money and kill the planet is now baked into some of the antivirus programs. Don’t buy Norton; cryptomining in antivirus programs should not be supported.

The tables have turned. Windows OS was where the antivirus companies made their money from non-enterprise customers, but with the built-in Windows Defender being surprisingly good, I guess MacOS might be the next cash cow. It’s unfortunate that the open source ClamAV antivirus does not have a MacOS GUI client. So you might need to pay for MacOS antivirus in 2022.

tldr

If you can take the ads, use Avira¹ for free. If not, Sophos, Bitdefender, and Malwarebytes are good.

• macos
• antivirus