PR. Gamers would crucify Nvidia if they did it. All the hate towards scalpers would go to Nvidia doubled.
Right now there is a small chance to buy at MSRP. I managed to do it by calling around small stores in the area that didn't have a functioning online store - scalpers didn't bother with those..
Price definitely impacts reviews as well. If you want to boost customer reviews on any product, cutting the price resets customer expectations to the downside. Raising prices for any reason also raises customer expectations.
How about increase MSRP but offer a redemption via the web, one per user (ie only one per bank account OR email OR phone). Individuals could buy and get $X00 off, once. Scalpers would need a fresh email, bank account, phone number every time they wanted to get a GPU or would be stuck selling at $X00 above the true retail price?
I think there's a VAT penalty, but could it work??
Not enough, its super easy to create fresh email, card phone numbers. Only difficult thing to change is shipping address but only if that's strictly enforced to only USPS valid addresses which ive never seen anywhere
Personally, I have absolutely zero faith that any additional revenue would go towards improving their products or availability. It would go to their shareholders; NVidia (Intel) treats its customers like consumers.
If their prices aren't responding to supply/demand now, they weren't before either. The price of a NVidia GPU isn't set by market forces; never has been.
Those words aren’t synonymous in denotation—who wants to be called a consumer? I think the term customer implies respect for those you do business with rather than viewing people who buy your product as numbers on a spreadsheet.
These are luxury items, where 95% of people will be using to play AAA video games at nice but but pretty extravagant 144hz 1440p/4K or as space heaters.
Given the spike in demand right now, traditional supply and demand would suggest raising prices and using the money to produce more chips, which in the end would net more money and bring the price down. The reason that won't happen has more to do with the feasibility (or lack thereof) of scaling production of GPUs by throwing money at it and the transient nature of the spike than Nvidia being helmed by a shadowy cabal that responds to neither their own incentives nor the market.
This one cycle might not be enough to fund more production but if your business keeps running into these shortage cycles then given enough cycles it would become profitable to put more money into production. This isn't the first time it happened.
Of course it's not the first spike, but adding enough capacity to cover every spike in the future would mean far larger production than is needed for the vast majority of the time.
Nope. You're still enshrining post facto control mechanisms by which the manufacturer controls what you do with the hardware after you recieve it.
Why is it so hard for businesses to just sell things? Why must they encroach? I'm not even a miner, but I'm not inviting anyone into my system to make a judgement call on whether my use of something I paid for is consistent with what they want. They sold it. They should not only have to part with the drivers, but with any semblance of software enforced binning too.
Because the “gamer” customers will still be there after Bitcoin crashes and it makes sense to not piss your long term customers off to please the short term ones.
At least that’s the argument. We’ll see how it plays out.
This is funny observation. Before some recent hurricane, thousands of cars were shuttling between empty network gas stations, presumably guided by their apps, to no avail, while I was able to top the tank by going several streets into nearest small village and finding standalone "mom and pop" station.
What you mean is there is a small chance for a bot script to buy them that checks the sites for the 24/7 . There is no chance of a human clicking on the pages with a mouse of buying them
Smaller shops get some stock too. Smaller shops often don't have an online store or the one they have is broken or doesn't represent current their stock. Scalpers don't bother with those stores.
I literally entered "computer store toronto" into Google and started calling every small one in the results. I found what I needed in fewer than 15 calls and picked it up an hour later.
Right now there is a small chance to buy at MSRP. I managed to do it by calling around small stores in the area that didn't have a functioning online store - scalpers didn't bother with those..