I have a hard time believing that your less technical friends are even following Apple news. The average person that walks into an Apple store and buys a Mac probably has no idea about the original vulnerability, let alone the multiple patches for it.
The average person that updated their iOS to 11 during the first two weeks has definitely noticed how bug-ridden it is with power issues, 3D touch issues, and the autocorrect bug.
We've trained people to update ASAP for security reasons, but when Apple drops the ball and seriously fucks up iOS 11 for a month until 11.1.1 was released, this will keep users update-shy.
I hope 2018 emphasises rock-solid releases for both macOS & iOS. Or Apple should move to a two-year release cycle (wishful thinking).
There is still unfixed IOS 11 introduced bug [1] that kills notification screen which requires powercycle to fix.
Some users hit it multiple times a day.
Maybe they won't be aware of this particular vulnerability but issues like the the iOS autocorrect bugs[1][2] get memed to death on all sorts of mainstream social media platforms. Even the original "root" tweet got 10k+ retweets.
Sure but that's still a far cry from saying that even a significant percentage of the Mac user base is aware of it. Social media moves so fast that there's almost no chance it penetrated the zeitgeist. A big well known flaw was the iOS 8.0.1 update that bricked iPhones. That was pulled within a few hours of it being released but the scale of the iPhone meant that it impacted a large number of people. This is too invisible for anyone to notice.
