No doubt about it, who craves with desire to purchase a hardware component or a console , seriously risks running into very long waiting times . We have already seen in recent weeks how the new video cards GeForce RTX 3000 of Nvidia are practically unobtainable , and those who sell them offer them at prices much higher than the list prices. Yesterday it was the Ryzen 5000 by AMD, sold out quickly in many Italian and foreign stores.

In some cases it is the fault of the so-called “scalpers”, ie those who buy a certain product in bulk to create scarcity and resell it to higher prices, but in reality at the base of everything there is a limited initial availability . At the same time, Sony announced that on day one the Playstation 5 will be delivered only to those who placed the order online: the company has talked about a decision to safeguard customers in this pandemic time, but to many – including us – it seemed a way to prevent many from going in the shop to not find enough consoles.

And it’s not over, if we go back briefly to the AMD house, we start to rumors of a limited number of Radeon RX video cards 6800 XT at launch , with Asus’ country manager for Sweden discussing on the SweClockers website forum (via WCCFTech) stated that the Radeon RX 6800 XT will finish in a few minutes . Furthermore, the custom models will start arriving only 1-2 weeks after the debut (initially there will apparently be reference cards branded by the partners). The situation should be slightly better in terms of stock for the RX 6800, but still not such that we can speak of abundance.

Waiting to see what actually happens with the new Radeons and maybe even with the Xbox Series X | S, a trend seems to emerge in ‘technology industry against which little can be done: a question to the stars and a production chain that cannot keep up , perhaps because how every other area discounts the “new difficulties” created by the COVID pandemic – 19.

Let’s start from this second aspect: producing millions of chips and consoles is something that doesn’t happen overnight and often we start months in advance. Let’s take the Xbox Series X: some news traces the start of production to May and Ina Gelbert, director of Xbox France, said that in the event of a new lockdown, the availability of the product would clearly be affected. The restrictive measures, more or less serious, create problems at every level and between supplies of materials, logistics, production interruptions and all related and connected , it is possible that the supply chain was unable to achieve the set objectives.

The most important element, however, is perhaps linked to question : the pandemic is forcing millions of people to move little and stay mostly at home , which leads to making purchases more directed towards entertainment, especially at a time when the gaming sector is laying the foundations for the next five – six years of “fun” with the new consoles: it is natural that many waited for this moment to change the console or deeply renew the PC . Furthermore, gaming is no longer a niche sector, but it is growing so rapidly that it gains millions of new customers every year, and this aspect cannot be underestimated.

It therefore follows that the demand for technology worldwide is therefore very high, more than seen in past years , and chip and component manufacturers have been taken on the counterattack: think of a reality like TSMC that has to fulfill orders for CPU, GPU and chips for PS5 and Xbox Series X in the case of AMD, without counting Apple’s orders for the iPhone 12 and those of the other entities with which it does business. Nvidia has “turned” on Samsung, perhaps also because TSMC was saturated, and if in this specific case some technical problem cannot be excluded due to the fact that the South Korean company does not usually produce such complex GPUs, the fact remains that it is a manufacturer different from TSMC, so inevitably the problem is general and not of a single or a specific project. Nvidia told us about a question that was out of scale compared to the wildest expectations.

To all this we must add that companies evidently underestimated the question , and not because they are full of idiots, but because it is difficult to analyze a new situation like this: we thought we had already seen everything, but not a pandemic that would have forced us into the home for a long time. Perhaps not knowing how the public would react, the initial production remained at insufficient levels to satisfy real demand.

All this brings us to the picture we have now : stocks that disappear in a few minutes and weeks to replenish a minimum stock. You have to arm yourself with patience, inveigh against the world is useless, it is a difficult time in every respect, even to buy the object of desire, whether it is a processor, a video card or a console.