The warranty and any other legalese from intel is irrelevant here, this is about consumer protection laws of various countries that supersede an intel warranty. A serious post sale drop in performance would be enough for a refund on any computer purchased in many countries. In Australia if I bought a computer 6 months ago I'd be entitled to take it back to the store for a refund, then it's up to them to argue with dell and dell to argue with intel.

> Note that the cost of overly onerous regulation (e.g. requiring that every computer manufacturer replace these chips even though the problems can largely be worked around in software) is of course passed onto consumers.

Demanding that a product works and in lieu of that offering a replacement or refund is not overly onerous regulation, it's a very basic standard protection.

For something like Meltdown/Spectre, the patches/workarounds reportedly barely affect some workloads, but cause drastic slowdowns for others. So already not everyone's affected to the same extent. Then you have computers with easily replaceable CPUs vs. stuff like phones and laptops which probably were only designed to work with a single CPU, and the manufacturer's already working on their next model and doesn't want to waste money building replacement parts for the previous one. At that point, maybe you have a complaint with e.g. Apple for selling you an iPhone that doesn't work as performed because they had to work around a security problem, and Apple might themselves go after Intel. The whole situation is a lot more complicated than "it should totally be covered under the warranty."