> Those switches went away, but the underlying issues remained. The new method was some firmware that did a bunch of pre-boot configuration. That was refined ov

> Those switches went away, but the underlying issues remained. The new method was some firmware that did a bunch of pre-boot configuration. That was refined over the years and now today there's an entire computer running it's own OS that manages all this stuff. I'm really impressed about how people manage to self-convince themselves so much about something they don't know about to the point they can explain their imaginary tech stack with such aplomb. The ME is not needed to do PnP conf (or whatever it has been renamed too those days), and to the best of my knowledge is not used to do that and has never been. ACPI/EFI & their friend are sufficiently hosted on the CPU, and can run platform code at so called negative privilege level at runtime. I expect those computers with ME disabled to run as well as if ME would not have been disabled, including if you add or remove an extension card. However you are right about remote management (that's the main advertised application of ME) and probably DRM stuff.