Originally posted by: Nothinman
i'm trying to convince my gf that the minimac would be a good comptuer for her since its basically immune to virus/spyware
That's a really bad reason to buy one. Eventually something will come out for OS X and you won't notice until it's too late because of your false assumption that the gay apple icon makes you invulnerable. I'm not saying they're bad computers, just that they're more expensive and the gains might not be worth the additional cost.
Actually OSX is inherently more secure than Windows mostly because of a lot of it being based upon open source and the fact that pretty much every program on it doesn't need administrator access to run ( unlike Windows where you pretty much need Administrator privledges to run a lot of things ).
I'd also recommend ensuring that the Mac is set up so that you MUST type in your administrator password if a program ( say during installation ) wants to modify anything in the core system. I believe it asks you this stuff when you first boot up the Mac.
As for learning the OS, it's quite a bit more intuitive. Apple spends a lot of money on UI research, in fact they spend the most, far more than MS.
A good example of one of their practices is how their dialog boxes are designed, here's an example:
A dialog box pops up, and asks "This program wants to modify system settings, do you want to give it permission?"
Windows will give two buttons, "Yes" and "no". OSX will give you two buttons "Give the program Access" and "Do not give access".
This greatly reduces people from just clicking "yes" or "no" without actually knowing what they're doing because the dialog box might say "do you want to refuse access?" in which case you want to click "yes".
This is one of the many things that I like about OSX.