@ademan @EdBoatConnoisseur I feel like its the latter. Its too niche of an option and very few people are going to go out of their way to buy purism or take apart their whole laptop to flash the bios chip.
Funny thing is, Dell used to have an option for buying laptops with intel ME disabled. That was up on their website by accident, and once they figured out people were buying those laptops they removed the option.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/eidhq4/how_to_buy_a_dell_laptop_with_the_intel_me/
>it is intended to be offered as a custom option for a select number of customers who specifically require this configuration
The "customers" in this case most likely being whole glownigger agencies that don't want spyware on their laptops. They use side channels like the ones above to indicate to vendors they don't want the "approved for goyim" version. So with their biggest customers taken care of, and the majority of everyone else running with a backdoor wide open, they really couldn't give a shit about the like 0.01% of people disabling it on their own.