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:
Two other pertinent terms that weren't really discussed in this article:
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.
LOL, we know Earth is vulnerable to being destroyed by aliens, but we don’t know if any have found their way to us yet, or even if any plans have been formed by them to do so!