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Comment by icameron | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time that I remember seeing a story evolve on the internet. What was originally from a post on r/sysadmin 3 weeks ago is now summarized on a Blog article that's at the top of HN. Will it get picked up my mainstream media and be on everyone's news feed by next week? Or tomorrow, now that its picked up momentum? Besides being a really fascinating story, its having an interesting journey as news travels through different outlets and gets condensed and filtered down to more consumable forms.

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You weren't around when the Meltdown rumors started?

I remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation was centered around the Intel ME.

Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article.

I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?

It wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause.

The other phones involved still used quartz.

From the article:

"But quartz oscillators have some problems. They don’t keep time as well at high (and low) temperatures, and they’re a relatively large component—1×3 mm or so. In their quest for smaller and smaller hardware, Apple has recently started using MEMS timing oscillators from a specialized company called SiTime to replace quartz components.

Specifically, they’re using the SiT512, 'the world’s smallest, lowest power 32 kHz oscillator.' "

So it was size, not cost that led Apple to be using a susceptible component.

No doubt it will move to mass media

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