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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

I have no expertise in this, and can't even claim to have followed the entire article or video. But the PS5 has been out of stock ever since its release in Nov 2020. That is an astonishing fact to me. I can't think of anything like this in my lifetime. The flagship product of a multinational corporation has been sold out for 18 months. Empty shelves where a product should be.

It's just one isolated data point, but it's hard for me to understand how we could be seeing a coming bust when we are still in the midst of such a shortage.

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The Nintendo Wii had the exact same problem at launch. For the first 2 years or so they were near impossible to find in a store. I remember having to buy a used one for more than retail from some random dude in a parking lot, around a full year after it was released, and it was still hard to find for a long time after that.

What are their relative (stock-suppressed) sales though?

Similar for graphics cards. For about a year there just weren't any. One of the manufacturers set up a waiting list to sell direct to customers, but it was still taking a year on the waiting list for people to get them and they had to shut down the list. Even now two years into it, the low quantities available retail are still selling at double or triple MSRP.

I wonder how many years the companies can keep running without producing or selling much. Also what the situation is with employees. Here in the U.S. a company would be quick to start layoffs if there's no revenue and no work to do, and after years passed it wouldn't be easy to quickly restaff and rebuild capacity.

>Even now two years into it, the low quantities available retail are still selling at double or triple MSRP.

BestBuy had fine stock when I went in a week ago. Next gen is dropping soonish so miners are holding off.

I got my 3090 from a miner who was hooked in to the scalpers. They weren't so over priced, a lot of people just look at the cheapest possible 3090 and compare to that, not realizing there are different levels.

Switches and raspberries got really hard to find for a while too

Raspberry Pis are still widely out of stock. And not just Pis! The car industry has been facing chip shortages, Fujifilm's flagship digital cameras and lenses are still impossible to find and have been for years since the chip shortage started... Two years after Nvidia released their flagship GPUs they're finally able to be purchased, but they're only six months away from releasing the next generation, which will also likely be sold out immediately. No one has been able to use TSMC's latest fab tech other than Apple, because just Apple's demand for chips maxed out their entire production capacity. This is the largest chip shortage in my lifetime certainly, and possibly since the invention of the semiconductor.

Predicting an oversupply any time soon when chips in the leading, middle, and trailing edges are in an unprecedented shortage is like predicting that someday California will have too much housing. I mean, on a long enough timescale, maybe... But that's well into the "being too early is the same as being wrong" territory.

We desperately need raspberry pis for our product! Does anyone happen to know where we can find more? We are currently drifting back to x86 to deal with the immense shortage of Pis!

Just curious, what's your product?

The product I'm working on is in the smart locker space

Is that something you could get away with using an ESP8266 or ESP32 for? If so, that might solve your supply issue.

Definitely not. But thanks for the suggestion. We really would need raspberry pis, and the alternative is just moving over to x86. We need to run a real linux distribution, with chromium or similar, as well as serial, canbus, wifi, modem... :)

Not to sound nationalistic, but the fact that we(USA) are not setting up fabs like crazy makes me feel like it's temporary. The same way Georgia Pacific and friends didn't set up tons of TP factories during the pandemic.

I figure someone much smarter than me ran the numbers and decided it's not worth the cost. And chips being in such shortage for many years would likely be worth the cost.

All of that said, I wish the US gov would sponsor in some way new fabs in the US. It's nearly a national security risk at this point.

The US Government did precisely that with the CHIPS Act (2021). It allocated something like $40B for US manufacturing of semiconductors and $10B for R&D [1]. Intel is planning a megafab in Ohio that is estimated will cost $100B when it’s completed. The State of Ohio is giving $2B for the first two plants that are estimated to cost $20B [2].

Chip companies are making new fabs in the US and the US gov is helping to sponsor them.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/semiconductors/chips-act

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/2022/04/14/intel-neg...

Excellent, thank you!

I suppose I should have researched more recently before commenting. The fact that this doesn't make front page national news is mind boggling to me.

didn't it? I coulda swore i saw it on nbc news on tv, and i know i saw it in the washington post.

There are a few new fabs being built in the south west US.

In addition to the current chip shortage economic concerns, it's also a national security issue. Many of the chips American tech companies depend on are built in Taiwan, and geopolitically that's pretty dicey given China's ambitions. It locks the US into effectively needing to defend Taiwan militarily if it gets invaded, or else the US economy would get crushed.

(I mean, I think we should make sure Taiwan is never invaded and remains independent, but it's also not great to need to commit forces against a rival nuclear superpower if it does get invaded, given that said rival superpower continuously and loudly proclaims that Taiwan is part of its territory.)

Even for Apple stuff, it takes 4+ weeks to order anything outside of base models and a few other configurations. Normally It’s about 1 week.

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