It's been a pretty rough year for anyone trying to buy any sort of PC part this year (CPUs, GPUs even PSUs). Had to go stand in line to get one of the 3060 Tis like it was an Apple launch or something.
It saves money to have everything co-located.
It also amplifies the magnitude of physical-world disruptions.
Scalpers just appropriate the profit which the producers could make if they could afford it. Often they cannot because they declare a price at launch.
But then the bitcoin gpu shortage happened and people were paying double for mid tier GTX 10xx cards. The shortage went away and prices went back to normal, but then the 20xx cards launched with a huge price bump, likely helped by the shortage scalpers proving how much people would pay.
I don't believe Apple would want to charge $750/ea if they had ample supply.
Consumers are very sensitive to price fluctuations, it might makes sense short term to raise the price when demand outstrips supply, but consumers will remember the companies that "gouged" them.
Apple maybe would be able to get away with it, but for big companies having stable price is pretty important.
I don't think so... EA still sells a lot of games
If it's evenly matched, scalping would likely be a minor, potential problem, but not to the scale we're seeing on all of these gaming items.
Scalpers only exist when the true market price of something doesn't match the list price (Demand >> Supply). Graphics cards worldwide, microphones, at-home lifting equipment, USD in Venezuela... it's basically Uber's surge pricing but for products :)
They've been pretty much flat for the past 18 months. I've been wanting a 2TB SSD since 2018 and I've been watching the price sit stagnant at ~$250 canadian since june 2019 (dropped from ~$600 in the year before that).
I've had pretty good luck with everything so far, knock on wood. The 1.92TB drives I mentioned are SanDisk CloudSpeed Eco II, and they have been pretty good. What's really impressed me are the Dell/Toshiba write-optimized 1.6TB drives I picked up. Pricey, but excellent performance.
I have a few I think 240GB Intel drives I picked up as well. They initially had some of the problems you're referring to, which for me was not showing up after a warm reboot, but they haven't done that for a while, so I'm thinking it may have been fixed by an OS update.
OverclockersUK: 5700XT, 1050 Ti, 1030
Komplett.ie: GT 1030 and some random Quadro
computeruniverse.net: 1650 Ti, GT 710, RTX 3090 (for $2400)
scan.co.uk: Teslas, Quadros, GT 1030, GT 710, GT 210
That's it. No other RX 5000, no RTX 2000, no RTX 3000, no RX 6000.
So that's two of them don't even have gaming GPUs in stock, as an entire product category, and the others you get some last gen low end cards and one retailer with a 5700XT. It's a little more noticeable here.
Half of the ones you have listed are UK retailers.
I haven't checked the others but computeruniverse.net has various RX 5000 series GPUs in stock. So does mindfactory.de at the moment.
The new RX 6000 serious GPUs have been selling out quickly but they were just released this/last month and new stock does keep popping up.
The only products they havent run out of are listed at 2x the markup.
As it is now private middlemen take that profit, presumably by standing in said lines wasting a lot of time. And buyers now have to trust some rando on ebay to actually ship a 2k$ graphics card. That is not an optimal outcome.
Microsoft and Sony should have offered their new consoles using this method. Start at a very high price like $10,000, decrease the price until people start buying, resume decreasing the price when demand is satisfied, and repeat as needed.
Apple can’t afford the optics of launching a product at one price and then halving it a few weeks later.
There’d be angry op-EDs in Forbes, and the HN threads would be longer than the queues.
I'd say I agree it's a terrible time to build a high-end PC system. But I'm also saying that based on idle searches for components. I bought most of my PC parts in April 2019, and my (mid-range $300) GPU in spring 2020, with no issues with availability.
But it seems like motherboards are 25-100% more expensive now, and we are still waiting on $200-300 graphic cards from this generation.
I do think, though, that comparing a relatively single-purpose item like a gaming console to a general purpose desktop computer is also going to have pros and cons on both sides.
I'd much rather be shopping for mid-range (or last generation but still quite performant) computer parts than trying to get one of the consoles right now.
People on the high end could even wait 2 console cycles to refresh.