Huh, I didn't think about that. I know they do open boot loaders, but I just figured they'd leave the drive alone. Afaik, even Richard Stallman doesn't care about drive firmware, but I could be wrong there.

But that is a valid reason. I've thought about buying a Librem laptop, but the price always turned me away. I know part of this is scale issues, but it feels bad to pay 2x more for something with worse performance, and the hardware switches and open boot firmware don't seem like enough to justify it. But I guess they won't be able to drop prices until they get enough volume, so maybe that's the answer.