I'm honestly amazed at the PC component market for the past decade. The Thailand flooding that messed up HDD production, and crypto mining jacking up the price of GPUs, are just two examples

Second order effects of increasing centralization in pursuit of manufacturing efficiency.

It saves money to have everything co-located.

It also amplifies the magnitude of physical-world disruptions.

more efficient usually means more fragile

> SSD prices are amazing

They've been pretty much flat for the past 18 months. I've been wanting a 2TB SSD since 2018 and I've been watching the price sit stagnant at ~$250 canadian since june 2019 (dropped from ~$600 in the year before that).

Have you thought about used enterprise SSDs? White intermittent, I've picked up lower end 1.92TB drives for +/-$100.

It's just a want, not a need, so I haven't looked any further (just keep the occasional eye on the amazon price). May become a need (or at least, a financially-justifiable want) a few months after the google photos storage limit starts

Where do you find used enterprise hardware?

I intermittently check the Great-Deals subforum on the ServeTheHome forums. Most stuff is on eh4y, but sometimes it'll be on other sites.

EBay? I also see used enterprise hardware sold off Amazon.

Like Intel ones? hint: they are defective and all die. Its like buying used tires for your daily driver.

There are some, but also SanDisk, Dell (rebranded Toshiba), etc...

I've had pretty good luck with everything so far, knock on wood. The 1.92TB drives I mentioned are SanDisk CloudSpeed Eco II, and they have been pretty good. What's really impressed me are the Dell/Toshiba write-optimized 1.6TB drives I picked up. Pricey, but excellent performance.

I have a few I think 240GB Intel drives I picked up as well. They initially had some of the problems you're referring to, which for me was not showing up after a warm reboot, but they haven't done that for a while, so I'm thinking it may have been fixed by an OS update.

I do think logically, if supply is ample (greater than demand) than the return on scalper investment may drop below the point of being worthwhile. Transaction costs and the risk of no longer being the preferred direct retailer could result in scalping losing you money. As long as demand readily exceeds supply, having the in-demand item gives you the power to collect a greater price on that item.

If it's evenly matched, scalping would likely be a minor, potential problem, but not to the scale we're seeing on all of these gaming items.

Scalping disappears if supply matched demand (with perfect geographic efficiency). Buying from a scalper is strictly riskier than buying from a retailer (might not be able to return faulty equipment, etc). There might be exceptions for rare / limited edition items because then scalpers can potentially control the whole market and extract monopolistic profits (assuming the demand curve allows it).

Scalpers only exist when the true market price of something doesn't match the list price (Demand >> Supply). Graphics cards worldwide, microphones, at-home lifting equipment, USD in Venezuela... it's basically Uber's surge pricing but for products :)

The existence of scalpers implies demand outstripping than supply, so it’s the same thing.

Scalpers are also proving that companies can charge more. People laughed at the price of the AirPods Max, but they're selling very consistently and quickly on ebay for 750+

I think this is especially clear in nvidia GPUs. It would have been unlikely for nvidia to try doubling GPU prices for fear of the backlash and the risk of losing out if that wasn't countered by enough people willing to buy at the higher price.

But then the bitcoin gpu shortage happened and people were paying double for mid tier GTX 10xx cards. The shortage went away and prices went back to normal, but then the 20xx cards launched with a huge price bump, likely helped by the shortage scalpers proving how much people would pay.

Companies have other concerns than the immediate revenues though.

Consumers are very sensitive to price fluctuations, it might makes sense short term to raise the price when demand outstrips supply, but consumers will remember the companies that "gouged" them.

Apple maybe would be able to get away with it, but for big companies having stable price is pretty important.

> but consumers will remember the companies that "gouged" them

I don't think so... EA still sells a lot of games

That's likely solely because of supply-side constraints. Trying ordering AirPods Max on Apple's website right now, and you'll be informed of a 3-4 month ETA.

I don't believe Apple would want to charge $750/ea if they had ample supply.

Scalpers restrict supply by cornering the maket.

Is this actually happening? A bunch of people buying something for cheap and then immediately selling it for what the market can bear isn't cornering the market. For that you need a cartel (or a group of people acting in unison) buying the goods up, then hoarding it to drive up the price.

If the producers could produce more, scalping won't be possible.

Scalpers just appropriate the profit which the producers could make if they could afford it. Often they cannot because they declare a price at launch.

I'm humbly trying to upgrade from an i5-4670k to an i7-4790k (both of which are 7.5 years old) and it's a steal if you can find one for $150 + tax used on ebay. Madness.