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In the same way people are customers of Freescale or Infineon because they buy cars? I hesitate to use the car analogy because there are recalls, but you still take the vehicle to the company you bought it from, not the supplier of that faulty part.

Not only that, Intel produces most of its chips in the US. The one plant they have in China used older processes, had to be approved by the US government and should have been repurposed to make memory chips. If you sense a pattern...

As a customer and not an OEM, what would they do with this information other than ask other parties to hurry with updates?

The mitigations required OEMs to send firmware, microcode, and software updates.

> As a customer and not an OEM, what would they do with this information other than ask other parties to hurry with updates?

They could shut down machines for which it is an excessive risk; though honestly I don't think they should be privileged as customers go.

In some systems the PC maker controls the update path and not the operating system. As such it was important to get PC makers on the Team, otherwise users would have been left undefended.

OEM doesn't mean operating system, it means original equipment manufacturer (e.g. PC maker). You seem to have misread my comment.

So?