"It's not my personal responsibility to attempt to enforce antitrust against companies by boycotting them at significant personal expense".

Exactly, there are bodies that are supposed to protect consumers from that behaviour, unfortunately they failed everyone massively. That in itself begs for an inquiry how those institutions actually work and whether it is worth spending tax payer money on them if they consistently fail to deliver.

...and if that exact kind of navel-gazing is why they don't work? What then?

Charge people for failing to deliver, dispense huge fines and jail time. Then rebuild it in a way to avoid mistakes why the previous solution didn't work.

Additionally, it is still (for the moment) possible to engage with Apple computer hardware without using any of their bullshit services (like the App Store) into which all their anticompetitive behavior has so far been constrained.

This is of course not so on Apple mobile devices: it's dox yourself to the App Store or GTFO over there.

For CPUs Apple is actually upending the AMD Intel duopoly, isn’t that good for competition? Furthermore, AMD only recently broke back into the market, which Intel had a stranglehold on. This is the most competitive the CPU market has been since the early 00s.

What antitrust are we talking about.

It would seem to me there is fairly healthy competition between apple and windows laptops?

The thing is, every competitor is going to upgrade to these and if you stay with inferior Intel products, you give yourself competitive disadvantage. Unfortunately this is the current state of play. If I won't be able to achieve something the same speed competitor can, I put myself in a bad spot. I try to not mix emotions and business, however for a personal machine, I am rocking 5950X and it is awesome.

> I am rocking 5950X

Irrelevant from a mass market perspective. That chip is still out of stock at Best Buy and the Amazon third party version is marked up 54% versus MSRP.

Incidentally the 11900k is also out of stock at many retailers, but it's so much cheaper. You can still buy a pre-binned version that clocks 5.1GHz; even with markup that costs 30% less than the aforementioned third party 5950x.

Availability and price matter. My take on AMD's heavy focus on the enterprise segment right now is that they have no choice. If your enterprise partners get faced with scarcity issues, they will lose faith in your supply chain. You can tell a retail customer to wait patiently for 6 months, and even an OEM that makes retail devices (eg Lenovo) may forgive some shortfalls as long as there's a substitute available, but Microsoft and Google aren't going to wait around in line like that.

Mass market isn't buying individual PC parts and assembling the PC, they're buying prebuilts or using whatever their office mass-purchased. Go on dell.com right now and you can order a PC with a 5950x and RTX 3080. Good luck buying either of those individually without writing a web bot.

I just did. Fastest delivery (express) for ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R10 GAMING DESKTOP with base specs aside from 5950x and the cheapest liquid cooler (required by Dell for that CPU) is May 26. Some of the higher end default/featured configurations would deliver in late June. Not sure whats up with that.

Honestly the price/performance ratio there is pretty nice in the eyes of a Mac user like me, but I don't know what office is buying Alienware, and a bulk order would no doubt take longer to deliver. Those are the only machines popping up when you filter for AMD 5000 series on dell.com.

Considering that 5950x is AM4 compatible, folks who had bought a pre-built machine and want to upgrade are also part of the mass market. And I think you can't discredit the homebuilt PC crowd for a high-end desktop chip. The people who care enough to want this chip can probably figure out how to clip it into a motherboard and tighten a few screws and connectors here and there.