1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,800 One of my favorite parts of the holiday season is the anticipation for some hot new gadget, 2 00:00:04,800 --> 00:00:09,600 but for a lot of folks this year, excitement has quickly turned to frustration, 3 00:00:09,600 --> 00:00:14,400 as high profile electronics are harder to find than a copy of Half-Life 3. 4 00:00:14,400 --> 00:00:20,320 The new RTX 3000 GPU series from NVIDIA and the competing RX 6000 lineup from AMD 5 00:00:20,320 --> 00:00:24,240 are seeing severe stock shortages, as are the newest gen consoles, 6 00:00:24,240 --> 00:00:32,480 the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Oh, and as if that weren't enough, AMD's new Zen 3 CPUs are proving to be just as elusive. 7 00:00:32,480 --> 00:00:39,600 And frankly, it couldn't come at a worse time, seeing as these products represent significant leaps forward in terms of price to performance. 8 00:00:39,600 --> 00:00:45,520 So why can no one seem to get their hands on one? Let's start with the big, annoying elephant in the room. 9 00:00:46,160 --> 00:00:49,840 Skelper bots snapping up all the available stock. 10 00:00:49,840 --> 00:00:54,400 Despite efforts from some of the major online retailers to prevent bots from making purchases, 11 00:00:54,480 --> 00:01:00,000 stock drops of high demand products only lasted for a matter of seconds before they sold out. 12 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:03,120 But where are all these bots coming from? The deep web? 13 00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:06,880 The future? Dr. Robotnik? 14 00:01:06,880 --> 00:01:13,120 One of those. Nope, it turns out that many of these bots are pre-written and can actually be purchased 15 00:01:13,120 --> 00:01:18,320 from certain websites. And though these bots aren't cheap, they're priced reasonably enough that after a piece of 16 00:01:18,320 --> 00:01:21,440 gear is flipped at a markup of several hundred dollars or more, 17 00:01:21,520 --> 00:01:25,120 the scalper isn't going to care too much about whether they paid for a bot. 18 00:01:25,120 --> 00:01:29,200 Throw in the fact that most anti-skelping and anti-price gouging laws are directed at 19 00:01:29,200 --> 00:01:32,400 event tickets and essential items, not electronics. 20 00:01:32,400 --> 00:01:36,160 And you have a situation where there's not a whole lot you can do other than be patient, 21 00:01:36,160 --> 00:01:41,840 wait for supply and demand to even out a little bit, and resist the temptation to buy from those nasty scalpers. 22 00:01:41,840 --> 00:01:48,720 But let's dig a little deeper, lest you think we're just lazily going to blame the bots and call it a day. 23 00:01:48,720 --> 00:01:53,680 The problems that Intel has had with building their CPUs on ever smaller process nodes might 24 00:01:53,680 --> 00:02:01,040 have foreshadowed what we're seeing with the current shortages. Although Intel doesn't make chips for consoles or graphics cards, at least not quite yet, 25 00:02:01,040 --> 00:02:05,120 anyway, we might be seeing other chip makers having somewhat similar struggles cranking 26 00:02:05,120 --> 00:02:11,440 out more advanced silicon. Silicon? You see, all of these platforms, with the exception of the RTX 3000 series, 27 00:02:11,440 --> 00:02:15,440 are being built on a seven nanometer process, which is significantly smaller than their 28 00:02:15,440 --> 00:02:19,440 predecessors. And even the ampere cards are based on an eight nanometer process, 29 00:02:19,440 --> 00:02:25,120 which is still tiny. The inherent complexity that arises when you try to fit more and more transistors 30 00:02:25,120 --> 00:02:28,880 into the same area means that chip yields go down. 31 00:02:28,880 --> 00:02:33,360 This means that a smaller process can result in a higher proportion of chips that are defective 32 00:02:33,360 --> 00:02:38,000 and have to be discarded, as well as higher costs and possibly slower output. 33 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:41,680 It's been well documented, sometimes even by the chip makers themselves, 34 00:02:41,680 --> 00:02:45,280 that it's harder and costlier to make these more advanced chips. 35 00:02:45,280 --> 00:02:48,880 True, Moore's law predicted that faster chips would be cheaper, 36 00:02:48,880 --> 00:02:53,760 but this was the case only to a point. And although NVIDIA claimed that they had plenty of supply, 37 00:02:53,760 --> 00:02:56,960 and the issue was simply that demand was unprecedented, 38 00:02:56,960 --> 00:03:01,040 the lack of detail surrounding availability of this year's big ticket electronics 39 00:03:01,040 --> 00:03:05,760 might suggest that difficulties in chip manufacturing may be at least partly to blame. 40 00:03:05,760 --> 00:03:09,760 And of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the pandemic. 41 00:03:09,760 --> 00:03:13,600 With much of the world subject to varying degrees of restriction on traveling or going 42 00:03:13,600 --> 00:03:18,320 to public places, people have been turning to gaming as a way to pass the time instead. 43 00:03:18,320 --> 00:03:23,360 Gamers rise up. In the US, for example, gaming industry sales were up more than a third 44 00:03:23,360 --> 00:03:28,320 over the previous year as of September 2020. And even before all these new gadgets dropped, 45 00:03:28,320 --> 00:03:36,800 the Nintendo Switch was seeing serious shortages with many consoles going for well over their typical $299 US suggested retail price. 46 00:03:36,800 --> 00:03:39,920 The pandemic has also pushed many of these buyers online, 47 00:03:39,920 --> 00:03:45,920 making it easier for scalpers to do a great impression of smog the dragon, hoarding their treasure. 48 00:03:46,960 --> 00:03:52,800 Is that a stupid reference? While also disrupting manufacturing and supply chains to various degrees, 49 00:03:52,800 --> 00:04:00,160 making it harder for chip makers to keep up with demand. All in all, it's been a perfect storm of factors that are keeping that GPU or console 50 00:04:00,160 --> 00:04:06,720 out of your hands. But remember, you can still play everyone's favorite MMORPG called Real Life. 51 00:04:07,280 --> 00:04:10,640 I hear the graphics. Are okay.