WEBVTT 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, 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:09.600 but for a lot of folks this year, excitement has quickly turned to frustration, 00:00:09.600 --> 00:00:14.400 as high profile electronics are harder to find than a copy of Half-Life 3. 00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:20.320 The new RTX 3000 GPU series from NVIDIA and the competing RX 6000 lineup from AMD 00:00:20.320 --> 00:00:24.240 are seeing severe stock shortages, as are the newest gen consoles, 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. 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. 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. 00:00:46.160 --> 00:00:49.840 Skelper bots snapping up all the available stock. 00:00:49.840 --> 00:00:54.400 Despite efforts from some of the major online retailers to prevent bots from making purchases, 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. 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.120 But where are all these bots coming from? The deep web? 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:06.880 The future? Dr. Robotnik? 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 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 00:01:18.320 --> 00:01:21.440 gear is flipped at a markup of several hundred dollars or more, 00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:25.120 the scalper isn't going to care too much about whether they paid for a bot. 00:01:25.120 --> 00:01:29.200 Throw in the fact that most anti-skelping and anti-price gouging laws are directed at 00:01:29.200 --> 00:01:32.400 event tickets and essential items, not electronics. 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, 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. 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. 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:53.680 The problems that Intel has had with building their CPUs on ever smaller process nodes might 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, 00:02:01.040 --> 00:02:05.120 anyway, we might be seeing other chip makers having somewhat similar struggles cranking 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, 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:15.440 are being built on a seven nanometer process, which is significantly smaller than their 00:02:15.440 --> 00:02:19.440 predecessors. And even the ampere cards are based on an eight nanometer process, 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 00:02:25.120 --> 00:02:28.880 into the same area means that chip yields go down. 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 00:02:33.360 --> 00:02:38.000 and have to be discarded, as well as higher costs and possibly slower output. 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:41.680 It's been well documented, sometimes even by the chip makers themselves, 00:02:41.680 --> 00:02:45.280 that it's harder and costlier to make these more advanced chips. 00:02:45.280 --> 00:02:48.880 True, Moore's law predicted that faster chips would be cheaper, 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, 00:02:53.760 --> 00:02:56.960 and the issue was simply that demand was unprecedented, 00:02:56.960 --> 00:03:01.040 the lack of detail surrounding availability of this year's big ticket electronics 00:03:01.040 --> 00:03:05.760 might suggest that difficulties in chip manufacturing may be at least partly to blame. 00:03:05.760 --> 00:03:09.760 And of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the pandemic. 00:03:09.760 --> 00:03:13.600 With much of the world subject to varying degrees of restriction on traveling or going 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. 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 00:03:23.360 --> 00:03:28.320 over the previous year as of September 2020. And even before all these new gadgets dropped, 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. 00:03:36.800 --> 00:03:39.920 The pandemic has also pushed many of these buyers online, 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. 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:52.800 Is that a stupid reference? While also disrupting manufacturing and supply chains to various degrees, 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 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. 00:04:07.280 --> 00:04:10.640 I hear the graphics. Are okay.