Yes, it does. Because this is a officially supported hardware list (read: liability to support, which heavily influences enterprise and business purchasing and

Yes, it does. Because this is a officially supported hardware list (read: liability to support, which heavily influences enterprise and business purchasing and upgrade decisions). It's important to remember that "support" in this context does NOT mean function, that's an entirely separate and unrelated issue. Put another way, Disabling those mitigations does not prevent the product from functioning, but it will allow MS and Intel to deny support and push a new product as a fix instead. Just because you can disable the mitigations or that the new family of products may well be flawed (in a similar manner, or in entirely support manner) is frankly irrelevant, and suggesting as such entirely misses the point. This is a business (Intel) pushing a product through a partnership (With MS) with the idea that they'll both see boosted returns from upgrades to newer hardware families and in turn new OEM/Enterprise licensing. Why fix the problem when you can bury it under new quarterly sales.