We’ve been waiting to hear from Apple ever since we first heard about the far-reaching Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws earlier this week, and the company has finally responded with some not-so-good news: All Mac and iOS devices are affected. That's right, all of them. However, Apple ensures us there's no reason to panic.
As we've been learning all week, Apple explains that the bugs are related to a CPU feature called speculative execution, which seeks to boost speeds by operating on multiple tasks at the same time: “To increase performance, the CPU predicts which path of a branch is most likely to be taken, and will speculatively continue execution down that path even before the branch is completed. If the prediction was wrong, this speculative execution is rolled back in a way that is intended to be invisible to software.” The Meltdown and Spectre exploits would theoretically be able to trick that process in order to gain access to privileged data.
