Lids were a good idea when Indium solder was cheap, they hide the die and it's sometimes shrinking size as well as for a few other reasons, but as demand increased fueled by Solar Panels and LCDs, Intel tried to replace it, and surreptitiously pass blame on the increased transistor density.
Consumers were stuck with worse thermals and a sizeable increase in peak power consumption. It's alarming how to this day the usual suspects, calling themselves tech review press, kept completely mum on this subject. In fact when Ian brought delidding up on the podcast he was met by Anand with pretty awkward silence.
It's not the first time companies saved cost by increasing the consumers power bill. In fact before the UuP Directive, that's what makers of electronics did for a living.
Selling shims for delidded processors is obviosly a pretty crazy thing to do, though one could just punch them out of aluminium sheets. The long term solution to the problem is to politely ask Intel to stop enraging the custom builders as well as delivering worse than necessary product to every single desktop user and sell a (shimmed?) bare die version. Maybe we should also nag the press to relay this message to Intel as often and as emphatically as possible.
From Wikipedia article on Indium:
Demand increased as the metal is used in LCDs and televisions, and supply decreased when a number of Chinese mining concerns stopped extracting indium from their zinc tailings. In 2002, the price was US$94 per kilogram. The recent changes in demand and supply have resulted in high and fluctuating prices of indium, which from 2006 to 2009 ranged from US$382/kg to US$918/kg. It has been estimated that there are fewer than 14 years left of indium supplies, based on current rates of extraction, demonstrating the need for additional recycling.