> entirely our own design and architecture, with no white-label or pre-existing ODM/OEM parts

My impression was that Quanta does way more for Framework than final integration. Well, good to see that somebody takes on the design themselves today.

> The cost of developing a from scratch laptop like ours is closer to the mid seven figures.

With most of that being the cost of buying the reference design, and access to the documentation I believe?

I last worked on a budget Atom laptop back in 2014. Back then the docs were freely available with enough good Googling, as well as commercial quantities of Atom chipsets sold around Intel's channel. Now I believe it's near impossible without going through an Intel approved IDH.