You don't have to. Libreboot is available for some Thinkpads. I use an X200s. There are businesses that offer Libreboot flashing services or sell refurbished Laptops with Libreboot installed.

Except libreboot doesn't help. ME executes below BIOS/UEFI.

That's not the case. ME code is large and not bundled inside CPU. On old systems it's was possible to not provide ME firmware while keep CPU operational.

On modern systems it's will just poweroff every 30 minutes if ME firmware not present and this is why libreboot won't support any newer hardware.

> On modern systems it's will just poweroff every 30 minutes if ME firmware not present

That's highly suggestive of a hidden agenda.

You can still turn ME into "manufacturing test mode", where it will not execute things.

But in that mode Intel Network Cards will poweroff every 3 minutes.

I wondered why my I219-V didn’t work, until I found it worked with ME in normal mode.

Now I’m back on a 2006 100M Realtek NIC

> in that mode Intel Network Cards will poweroff every 3 minutes

This is ridiculous. This is not a rootkit waiting to happen, it's already an operational rootkit!

What is this company trying to achieve? Is this a military asset designed to attack foreign countries? Is the Cold War not over?

And, even worse, why is there not yet a startup competing with Intel in the desktop market?

Are fabs the issues? Knowledge? Engineers? I mean, Uber got many billions in funding, with Ubers funding one could build easily a fab for 14nm process and hire all of AMD.

Will it also shut down add-in cards in a PCIe slot?

Nope, that’s why my 2006 Realtek card works.

I guess I should have specified Intel add-on cards, but it's easy enough to buy non-Intel.

Yes. What on earth would be the non-malicious purpose of this feature?

Wrong. On some machines, such as the X200, you can actually remove and disable the ME with coreboot/libreboot.

Interesting, I understood that wrong then. But granted, I was researching it for the x220 and it was a while ago. Thanks for the hint.

Yeah, between this and the power saving bugs in the last few generations of i-core processors I'm really feeling deflated about the last 2 laptops I bought. I used an Acer c710 w/coreboot+seabios and it worked so well. Good battery life, and mostly open bios. IIRC, me blobs were compiled in to coreboot but at least it worked without disabling hardware features.

There are better choices, see https://minifree.org.