So it's been ten days now. Ten days of setting an alarm, refreshing Best Buy's product page at 8:59am, and watching the "Add to Cart" button either not appear at all or vanish the second I click it. I am talking, obviously, about trying to buy an RTX 3080.
For anyone who's managed to avoid this particular flavor of suffering: Nvidia's RTX 3080 went on sale September 17th at $699 for the Founders Edition, and by most accounts it sold out everywhere within about ten minutes. Not because demand was some unprecedented tidal wave (though it probably was pretty high, this is a genuinely big generational leap over the 2000 series) but because a huge chunk of that initial stock got hoovered up by bots and immediately relisted on eBay for $1,200, $1,400, once I saw a listing at $1,650 for a card that doesn't even exist in most warehouses yet. Nvidia itself basically admitted bots were the problem, which is a weird thing for a company to say about its own launch and then just sort of shrug at.
EVGA, bless them, tried to do the responsible thing and set up a queue system for their step-up program and newsletter subscribers. I got in line. I am, as of this morning, still in that line. There's something almost funny about a graphics card launch requiring the same kind of virtual queueing software that concert ticket sites use, except at least Ticketmaster tells you your position in line. This just tells you to keep the tab open and not refresh, which, come on.
I'll admit part of my frustration here is personal history talking. I bought a GTX 460 back when I started this blog in 2011 and I distinctly remember it being a completely unremarkable process — walk into a Fry's, hand over money, walk out with a box. Every few years since then I seem to end up writing one of these posts, and every time the situation is somehow worse. The 1080 launch in 2016 wasn't this bad. This is a new low, and I don't think it's entirely Nvidia's fault, but I also don't think "well the scalpers are just really good at bots now" is a satisfying explanation for why regular people can't buy hardware at retail price on release week plus ten days.
The RTX 3090 came out a week later, on the 24th, at $1,499, and from what I can tell that one's actually easier to find in stock right now, mostly because normal humans looked at a fifteen-hundred-dollar graphics card and went "no thank you." Which, fair. I looked at it too. I closed the tab.
Amazon had its hardware event that same week and announced a redesigned spherical Echo and this genuinely bizarre little indoor drone camera thing called Ring Always Home Cam that flies around your house on a preset path taking video. I don't really have a strong opinion on it beyond finding it deeply funny that "a drone patrols your living room" is a product now and not a plot point in a mildly dystopian short story. I'm not buying one. I'm mentioning it mostly because it's a nice small distraction from card-refreshing, which at this point has become something closer to a nervous tic than an actual shopping strategy.
I keep telling myself I'll just wait for the 3070 in October and let this whole mess settle down, that patience is a virtue, etc. Then I open a new tab and check Best Buy again anyway. I don't fully understand why I'm doing this to myself given that my current card, an aging 1070, still runs everything I actually play just fine. There isn't really a lesson here. I just wanted to get it written down somewhere that this was a genuinely strange week to be a person who wanted to buy a piece of computer hardware, and that ten days later, I still don't have one.