While it is hard to assess- they appear to do quick scanning mostly for in memory threats, do not support scanning the entire drive/specific folders or external drives and I believe retire detection for threats no longer active in the field. Malwarebytes Premium uses a different approach than most Mac antimalware vendors. Malwarebytes Premium uses a minimal amount of memory, but CPU usage can fluctuate, though their 4.8 release allows one to limit CPU utilization for weaker machines.

Norton and Bitdefender both fall in this category. Again, the better designed packages will not cause an appreciable or noticeable slowdown on modern machines. Vendors feel the need to use significant amounts of memory to address the wide number of threats and to enable a quick machine response. This memory utilization appears fairly constant, but can increase over on-time. Bitdefender currently uses about 1 GB of system memory. Norton uses around 400-500 MB of ram and does a fair amount of writing to disk. Some of the major packages use a considerable amount of memory- with CPU utilization changing constantly depending on computer activity.

All are compatible with Big Sur and will run using Rosetta 2. Most malware protection is not optimized for the Mac M1 (Universal). It is all too easy to do this- without thinking, especially when one is tired/vulnerable and/or the site appears trusted, such as Filezilla's FTP software site. It is also true that most Mac malware requires the user to download something, for example installing Adobe Flash, clicking on a download link, etc. It is true that the majority of Mac malware is adware- but adware can be extremely dangerous- capturing passwords and riddling the machine with hooks into malicious sites. The Malwarebytes 2020/2021 State of Malware Report makes a strong case for Mac malware protection.

Norton utilities premium for mac