Apple says the machines are 40% faster. But Intel has patched their ZombieLoad vulnerability this week which is a 40% perf hit. So these machines are going to be as fast as unpatched machines that we have today?!
The 40% performance drop only applies if you turn off hyperthreading, which nobody (including Apple) is doing out of the box. You can consider these processors vulnerable to ZombieLoad and unpatched out of the box. The timeline for development of a new product like a laptop is so long that these have been planned for months prior to the vulnerability announcement, if not a year or more.
If you want a machine that doesn't have ZombieLoad, and is also Intel, you have to wait until they really patch it in new hardware or disable hyperthreading.
