[Jiggly]

This just leaves room for Sony to steal some market share from Microsoft with the PS5. That's very poor planning on Microsoft's part. There's a lot of money to be made this time of the year, and Microsoft is losing out on revenue because of their own fault.

But I will say the bots and scalpers aren't making new hardware releases any easier this year for producers or consumers. Nvidia still has a serious scalper problem with their new RTX 30 series. If you lookup "RTX 3090" right now, you'll get listings with RTX 3090s going for upwards of $2,000. That's a $500 price hike from the original $1,499 launch price set by Nvidia. While you can still find some RTX 3060s and 3070s, it's by no means a wide selection. Microsoft and Sony both have the same problems with scalpers. On an Xbox Series X, you can expect to pay at least $800, sometimes $1,000.

But I'm not invested in consoles anymore, so I don't have to worry about them. I don't even get frustrated over new computer hardware. New hardware just gets too expensive for my liking. But the nice thing about computer hardware is that I can wait 1 or 2 years for everyone to move on to the next hot piece of silicon so I can get a good deal.

I think I'm done rambling now.

You say rambling but I agreed with everything you've said there. While being out of stock is a great sign of demand... That demand can shift if your competitors convince someone to go for their product instead as they have it available. The scalpers are a major problem. I think companies need to start taking measure to reduce the impact of scalpers.

I also agree on the hardware point. Even if I had the funds to buy something at that price new, what would be the point? These products depreciate in value so quickly as new products are released. However, generally speaking, you get several years worth of use from them before ever needing to upgrade. In my main PC, 80% of the components are Oni's old PC components, that are still running games on ultra despite the fact they're at least 5 years old now.