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Many Enterprise Mobile Devices Will Never Be Patched Against Meltdown, Spectre (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: The Meltdown and Spectre bugs have been in the headlines for a couple of weeks now, but it seems the patches are not being installed on handsets. Analysis of more than 100,000 enterprise mobile devices shows that just a tiny percentage of them have been protected against the vulnerabilities -- and some simply may never be protected. Security firm Bridgeway found that just 4 percent of corporate phones and tablets in the UK have been patched against Spectre and Meltdown. Perhaps more worryingly, however, its research also found that nearly a quarter of enterprise mobile devices will never receive a patch because of their age. Organizations are advised to check for the availability of patches for their devices, and to install them as soon as possible. Older devices that will never be patched -- older than Marshmallow, for example -- should be replaced to ensure security, says Bridgeway.
I beleive that AMD devices are vulnerable too.
AMD chips are only vulnerable to Specter which isn't nearly as valuable. Meltdown is the crown jewel of hardware flaws.
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Given the mess of patch availability, I wonder how they can sort the cases where patch is not installed, patch is not yet available, and patch will never be available
Not true. The oldest iOS device that's affected by this is the iPhone 5 (iPhones prior to that didn't do speculative execution), Apple released a patch for the 5 (and all later devices).
As much as the parent poster tried to make this seem like a reason not to buy Apple, it really is a good reason to buy Apple. Every iOS device affected by these bugs has been patched, including 5 year old ones. There's likely Android devices STILL BEING SOLD that will never be patched.