Why do people hate McAfee so much?

[ebprince the computer nerd]

Every time I hear about McAfee, it’s either something bad or them uninstalling it. Why do people hate it so much? I’ve never personally used it, but I mean it looks fine, and it’s just an antivirus. (but Dell does the free trial overboard though) Has anyone even tried it? It has a free trial, but how much is the antivirus afterwards? I have a lot of questions about McAfee.

[thekingofmonks]

Because Afee is spellt similarly to Affe which means monkey in German. I hate McMonkeys.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

o geez I cant think of why

it acts like a virus, doesnt work, shares the name of its literal criminal creator, John McAfee

its worse than windows defender, and has much higher system imapct, (bassically making your system unusuable when its backround "protection" is on) its scans just start out of no where

[RONOTHAN##]

Half because free versions like Windows Defender and Malwarebytes do a better job for less system resources.

 

Half because its founder was infamous for doing a ton of drugs, laundering money, and a ton of other shady practices. He is one of the strangest figures in the tech industry, you can't make up half the things he did. 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

heh, wait until you hear about Norton

tbh.. while norton 2012 deserves all the shit in the world.. norton 360 does rather well. (for the right audience..)

 

on topic: mcafee is *that* antivirus that's got a trial version installed everywhere, randomly tags along when you're installing 'free' software, and has rather distasteful messaging towards the user.

 

but in general.. most of this 'hatred' is often based off a certain version of the antivirus (like above: norton 2012) or a statement or decision the company has made in the past, and people somehow cant realise that software changes over the course of 10 years.

[Bender Blues]

Any questions? 

 

[ebprince the computer nerd]

50 minutes ago, Bender Blues said:

Any questions? 

 

this is just an ultimate bruh moment

[dilpickle]

Most antivirus software starts out OK then turns into junkware that preys on the ignorant.

[LogicalDrm]

Most reasons mentioned here are about fame (or infamy) which should be irrelevant in real world. But for some reason, in tech world, irrelevant reasons are the most relevant.

 

People say "because Windows Defender is better". This wasn't the case when McAfee was notable bundle software with laptops and OEMs. Back then, Defender was the joke. Now things are different, but I would have hard time hating software just for being worse than another piece of software.

 

So besides infamy and comparing performance, the issues are with McAfee being bundled (like Norton), being heavy to run (some 5 years ago this was relevant), being hard to remove/uninstall and that's about it. Being forced to use it, and then being hard to get rid of. I don't remember if there was something going on with subscriptions too.

 

Do note that most of these "hate the X" things are really polar to persons own favorites. Good examples are Malwarebytes and CCleaner. These are both highly praised (which is fine). But both also have strong advertising going on for the pro versions. Which somehow gets past people praising them. As I have seen multiple times these software getting recommended as altertives to software with "aggressive ads". Another great example is Kaspersky which is premium AV according to testing. But being made by Russian devs, it gets some uncalled hate time to time. (They have moved representing office to UK and Switzerland, maybe to avoid this irrelevant hate).

[ebprince the computer nerd]

6 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

Most reasons mentioned here are about fame (or infamy) which should be irrelevant in real world. But for some reason, in tech world, irrelevant reasons are the most relevant.

 

People say "because Windows Defender is better". This wasn't the case when McAfee was notable bundle software with laptops and OEMs. Back then, Defender was the joke. Now things are different, but I would have hard time hating software just for being worse than another piece of software.

 

So besides infamy and comparing performance, the issues are with McAfee being bundled (like Norton), being heavy to run (some 5 years ago this was relevant), being hard to remove/uninstall and that's about it. Being forced to use it, and then being hard to get rid of. I don't remember if there was something going on with subscriptions too.

 

Do note that most of these "hate the X" things are really polar to persons own favorites. Good examples are Malwarebytes and CCleaner. These are both highly praised (which is fine). But both also have strong advertising going on for the pro versions. Which somehow gets past people praising them. As I have seen multiple times these software getting recommended as altertives to software with "aggressive ads". Another great example is Kaspersky which is premium AV according to testing. But being made by Russian devs, it gets some uncalled hate time to time. (They have moved representing office to UK and Switzerland, maybe to avoid this irrelevant hate).

so mcafee was once good with the same as norton but then they fell off because windows defender got better? gg microsoft lol. i mean even if defender was still garbage, i wouldnt pay mcafee or norton because they literally just shove ads down your throat to buy their anti-viruses. thats kinda like the companies strategies now, you annoy the customer so much into shoving ads down their throat (and sometimes misleading info like norton said one time thati had 15 viruses on my phone and i needed to buy norton to protect my phone. i had no viruses and it was just a really scummy way of getting me to buy it. which i didnt buy it) got off track, but after they annoy the customer so much, the customer decides to just give in and buy the product. its really stupid and scummy and its really bad and annoying

[LogicalDrm]

4 minutes ago, ebprince the computer nerd said:

so mcafee was once good with the same as norton but then they fell off because windows defender got better?

Both of them were midtier, but by buying new PC, you got 6 months free. Back in those days (WinXP to Win7) free AV was not really a thing.

 

4 minutes ago, ebprince the computer nerd said:

i mean even if defender was still garbage, i wouldnt pay mcafee or norton because they literally just shove ads down your throat to buy their anti-viruses.

You missed the latter part of my post? That's what ALL of them do.

 

4 minutes ago, ebprince the computer nerd said:

thats kinda like the companies strategies now, you annoy the customer so much into shoving ads down their throat (and sometimes misleading info like norton said one time thati had 15 viruses on my phone and i needed to buy norton to protect my phone. i had no viruses and it was just a really scummy way of getting me to buy it. which i didnt buy it) got off track, but after they annoy the customer so much, the customer decides to just give in and buy the product. its really stupid and scummy and its really bad and annoying

I've seen similar from Android version of CCleaner Pro...