The "giant security hole" I assume you're referring to isn't particularly worrisome for your own hardware running trusted software. It's more of a problem in a shared environment where you don't know who else is running code.

> The "giant security hole" I assume you're referring to isn't particularly worrisome for your own hardware running trusted software.

My concern is mainly javascript or webasm running in the browser. Even if there aren't currently any unpatched exploits of this nature, that's no guarantee that there won't be in the future.

First, that means it isn't a "giant security hole"; it's a potential security hole.

Second, if an exploit is discovered just disable the extra hardware threads until it gets patched.

As an aside, I don't know what your "supposedly" about the i5 is supposed to mean. The i5 has only one hardware thread per core.

> As an aside, I don't know what your "supposedly" about the i5 is supposed to mean.

The tech specs page on the Apple site doesn't give the exact part number, so there's always the chance it could be some previously unreleased chip.