Currently $1,299.00 for the Ultra 7 and $1,449.00 for the Ultra 9. I won't say it isn't a fair price, but it is a really hard one.
It would be perhaps more interesting to start making ARM or maybe even RISC-V motherboard replacements for some of these beloved chassis.
Would it help small shops if there were open schematics for laptop motherboards, like OpenCompute does for servers? Coreboot and other open firmware (e.g. EC2) could then target that "open" motherboard, even if the shipped board designs had 10% non-open customization for business differentiation.
Agreed. I would love just a basic ports carrier board with a compute module slot for any Raspberry Pi CM for my old and ancient thinkpads.
It's not the type of CPU that is driving up the cost. It's a niche hobby product which will sell O(tens-hundreds) units worldwide. The issue with these frankenpads is the brokenness of bios/ec, tb ports, thermals, fan noise, stability, etc.