Even worse, consoles aren't having these availability problems. If you buy a console, and you start building a games library, making friends who you play with on a daily basis (and you usually cannot crossplay between consoles and PC due to skill differences between controller/m+kb, sometimes it works with a controller on PC but most of the time it doesn't) then you are now locked into that ecosystem. You aren't buying a NVIDIA 40 series card, you are buying a PS5 Pro. The longer this goes on, the more customers NVIDIA is losing in the long term.

Inventory levels for consoles aren't quite normalized and available but with a stock tracking discord you can have a decent shot at getting a notice, going to a website, and successfully checking out if you hurry. In contrast you have zero shot at GPUs as a human, there are "cook groups" (the same groups that buy up fancy sneakers and scalp them) using backdoor exploits and botnets or networks of proxies embedded in browser addons, and the hardware is literally are gone the second it's up, or even before.

Rather notoriously, one of the cook groups got ahold of the DigitalRiver item IDs for the 3080 before the launch, and they used API requests to poke orders into the backend. So the items sold out before the listing even went up on the website. That is emblematic of the problem, every mechanism is being probed and any backdoor is being used to punch in orders before humans can get them. There are exploits and botnets and proxies being used and everything, hugely organized and sophisticated operations.

Every major retailer and every AIB partner (Zotac, Asus, etc) is heavily botted to the point where you stand no chance unless you pay for a $600/mo sneakerbot.