[relictele]

All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time

There's a contradictory weasel corporate statement if ever there was one.

[rlmorel]

I didn’t see it that way.

It is much like saying the earth can be hit by an asteroid, but we don’t see one right now that is a threat to hit it, or to say that achieving a controlled nuclear fusion reaction is possible, but there isn’t one working yet.

Or, your home is vulnerable to being broken into, but nobody has done so yet, and our street sources don’t indicate a working plan yet.

There is a lot of nefarious stuff, this one seemed pretty standard to me.

[markomalley]

There's a contradictory weasel corporate statement if ever there was one.

NOT a Mac fanboi at all, but this is actually a very accurate and appropriate statement.

Knowing that a vulnerability (a hole) exists is something very different than developing something to take advantage of that hole (exploiting that hole/vulnerability).

A car-related analogy:

• The vulnerability: car doors can be unlocked without the use of a key
  This is potentially a bad thing but isn't dangerous unless somebody can figure out HOW to unlock the car door without the key.
• An exploit: a slim jim can exploit the vulnerability in a car door locking mechanism (especially in older cars)

Two other pertinent terms that weren't really discussed in this article:

• mitigation -- reduces the ability of a specific exploit to take advantage of a vulnerability. Using our car example, if memory serves, car manufacturers used to weld in a little "shelf" into the car doors above the control arm to make it far more difficult to use a slim jim.
• remediation -- removing or reducing the vulnerability by redesigning the system. Again, in our car example, many cars built these days have a different mechanism than the traditional lock button -- the door lock is horizontally actuated versus vertically oriented.

To mitigate systems with this Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, OS publishers will re-write the OS to make it far more difficult for malicious code to be able to access the vulnerability. That will make computers (phones, tablets, etc) slow down some.

However, to actually remediate this, the CPU chips themselves will need to be redesigned so that these vulnerabilities no longer exist. That is going to be a quite lengthy and costly process. Costly both for Intel, ARM, and AMD, and also for enterprises who will feel it necessary to replace all of their processors.