In the last few days some products have been activated for pre-ordering, which have met with great customer interest: Nvidia has launched the 2nd generation of RTX cards in the form of Geforce RTX 3080 Sony introduced the PlayStation 5 and Microsoft the Xbox Series X. At the end of all three product presentations there were many frustrated interested parties and cancellations.
It started on September 17th with Nvidia: for 699,- Euro offered Nvidia the RTX 3080 "Founders Edition" the Nvidia-own online shop jumped directly from "Received notification" to "Out of Stock", there was apparently no real chance to order a corresponding card (I also tried to buy a corresponding card and watched the live broadcast). Amazon is said to have received 20,000 orders for a Zotac RTX 3080 model, most of which are now being cancelled.
The reason for the poor availability is said to be, besides the good price/performance ratio, once again miners of crypto-currencies, since the RTX 3080 should be quite suitable for Ethereum mining. In Germany this is not worthwhile due to the electricity prices, but in other countries this may be different.
Whatever the reason, the delivery times for Geforce RTX 3080 cards are currently not at all foreseeable, in the current Geizhals.at price comparison there is no single available offer for the RTX 3080.
At the Playstation 5 Sony has decided to quite suddenly unlock the possibility to pre-order the new console. Again, this has led to some chaos, like Gameswirtschaft.de reports many retailers cancel advance orders and the customers, who were only happy about a successful order, will probably go away empty-handed.
Last but not least, Microsoft has released the Xbox Series X for pre-ordering, but unlike Sony has given a concrete time. There was some confusion here because of the somewhat "arbitrary" designation of Microsoft products, the counting method for Windows versions is known. With the Xbox it is similar:
- Xbox (2001)
- Xbox 360 (2005)
- Xbox One (2013)
- Xbox One X (2017)
- Xbox Series X (2020)
The crux of the matter is to keep apart Xbox One X and Xbox Series X - not all interested parties seem to have succeeded in this, sales of the older model have increased significantly. Apart from that, the Xbox Series X is also currently sold out.
What makes Apple different?
If you regularly buy Apple products, you know the problem with low (some say: artificially scarce) availability: if I wanted to buy an Apple Watch Series 6 in the cheapest version today, the delivery would be between October 22nd and 29th, 2020 - actually the sale started on September 18th, 2020.
The main difference to Nvidia, Sony and Microsoft: if I had ordered at the earliest possible time, Apple would not cancel the order, even if the delivery date is more than 4 weeks in the future. Why the responsible people didn't take a look at the iPhone manufacturer and now that e.g. the pre-orders (even if it takes a long time) are processed in the order of receipt, can only be guessed.
We probably won't see an Nvidia RTX 3080 for the Founders Edition's UVP for the time being. How it will be with the upcoming launch of the RTX 3090 will probably be shown on September 24th, Nvidia at least wants to have the bots better locked out - but with a price of 1.500,- the interest might be less, because the card will not offer twice the performance of the 3080.
What are your experiences with the current consoles and graphics card releases? For my part, I'll wait and see how the situation develops - fortunately, this is only about "luxury products" that are not essential to life.
Update 25.09.2020: Delivery problems also with the Nvidia RTX 3090
Although the e-mail notification worked better in the launch of the well 800, - euro more expensive RTX 3090, really a difference in the availability of the map did not make that, however. Also here the Nvidia shop was sold out within shortest time, also here there is no difference in the price comparison (geizhals.de) not a single available offer. Obviously even the price of 1.499,- and the rather small additional performance of 15 - 20% did not ensure that a reasonable relation between availability and interest was created.
Update 11/24/202020: even AMD cannot do magic
AMD had announced in advance that there would be no such disaster with the release of their own graphics cards (Radeon 6800 & 6800XT) as well as processors of the Ryzen 5000 generation as with Nvidia, but reality shows a different picture. As of today (24.11.2020) there are no offers for the graphics cards in common price comparisons, processors like the Ryzen 9 5900X are only listed via "dubious" Amazon marketplace dealers for prices well above the RRP. Thus AMD has not been able to keep the announcement that their own products would be readily available.
[amazon box="B08H93ZRLL"]
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