It’s funny, I just had to have 40 feet of wood fence replaced and paid ~4K for parts and 1 day of labor. They also took away the old fence. My point, electronics are cheap. I know this point will not be received well though.
I had a similar sentiment when I had to purchase a set of new tires for my car. It is amazing how an assembly of rubber and steel can cost roughly as much as a device that has billions of transistors on it.
Bigger and thinner tires looks ridiculously expensive than it should (as a noob). I don't know the reason, does every tire manufacturers want to earn more from riches (who can buy a car with bigger and thinner tires)? This is important factor when I choose car.
I paid 1600€ for my last full PC (kept the old chasis and GPU) and 1700€ for my current work laptop. No, 1600$ (1900€ in Europe) is not cheap by any stretch of imagination.
I feel like both of those might be frivolous, but wood and labour are a more easily arguable expenditure. They're physical and do something physical with finite resources. A gpu often just gives you imaginary shadows faster. TVs just show you stuff, but for the same price of a nice one you could eat food for a year or travel overseas.
For $2000 you could get better light beams in a game you're already playing, or if you're physically capable you could take a mountaineering course and get a helicopter to and from a remote climb
So if you're in the business of having almost anything else to do with the money, it's going to seem like a really tenous financial choice.
It's why people pay thousands of dollars for a handbag cost maybe tens of dollars to produce. People like playing status games.
This effect is why third richest person on the planet is Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, someone you've likely never heard of. He's currently wealthier than Bezos. He didn't actually improve our lives or revolutionize industry. He just latched into our primitive status seeking behavior.
To be fair to Arnault, he isn't just CEO of Louis Vuitton but LVMH which owns something like ~100 brands, ranging from clocks, wines, fashion, cosmetics, boats, jewelry and other retailing. Although to be fair to you, most of what they sell could go into the "luxury" category.
It's likely he wouldn't be the third richest person with just Louis Vuitton and it's probably mostly because of LVMH.
Graphics cards are not some idiotic luxury good. They are a tool, used for work or leisure, whose price points seem to be set at luxury level for essentially arbitrary business reasons.
It absolutely can. There's only 2 players in this business, 3 if you count Intel but their GPU future doesn't sound promising.
Nvidia sets the bar and AMD follows. AMDs prices have slowly crept up as well. So no matter what, you're paying much more for a top spec GPU today than you ever have before.
It's in the best interests of both Nvidia and AMD to keep these prices high, and it's a detriment to the consumer.
AMD did it with their CPUs as well. They undercut Intel with some great price/performance deals. Grabbed their market share back and are now bumping those prices back up to parity with Intel. Now neither company has to cut their prices.
Nvidia will use artificial scarcity to push these prices. We know they can produce a shit tonne of GPUs, they did it for years.
While what you say is correct, the recent Ryzen 7000 announcement has shown that AMD remains much less greedy than NVIDIA, because with the top Ryzen 9 7950X at $700, the price per core has remained less than $50, about the same as it has been since the first Ryzen, even if the cores are now much faster.
Before the first Ryzen, only Intel Atom CPUs had a price around $50/core, while the better Intel Core CPUs had prices around $100/core. Then Intel had to also follow AMD and drop the prices for the top models to around $50/core (the "efficiency" cores in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake count as a half core).
So there is still hope that the RDNA 3 GPUs will have a more decent performance/price ratio, even if it is unlikely that they will be faster than the RTX 40 Series.
>Wasnt like half of all US dollars printed in last 3 years ?
No. "Printing Money" is a shortcut term used for many of the measures used by the federal reserve recently, but it's not literally printing money in this case (significantly less than trillion has actually been printed since 2019). Going into the details of the economics of this is a mess, and inflation is absolutely high and causing problems right now, and very likely is higher than official CPI numbers but it's not anywhere near 100% in 3 years. Keep in mind lots of prices dropped in 2020 and were still recovering/suffering in 2021, so that paints a skewed picture vs comparing 2022 to 2019 before covid wrecked things.
> It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
USD$700 circa 2013 adjusted for inflation is USD$890 in 2022. Feel free to pay more if you feel like it should be more though.
When it's not a phone, but an always-on 6.5" tablet computer with an excellent camera, persistent wireless high-speed internet, amazing screen, thousands of incredibly useful apps that obviate the need for dozens of other electronic devices, and near-desktop performance for web browsing anywhere, I don't mind paying mid-range laptop prices every few years when I use it literally 4-6 hours per day, every day.
I’m a little envious of people that can get away with that. I never will as a developer. But I would definitely switch from Apple to Samsung if I only had a phone. Life would be a lot easier with Dex docking.
In the US, at least, its common to simply pay that $1k phone over time on a plan - or simply never stop paying off a phone through an upgrade program, either through their carrier or direct (e.g. iPhone Upgrade Program).
$30/mo doesn't hit as hard as $1100 up front. For some consumers, its a fundamentally different way of thinking.
I wish there was a more open adoption of CUDA like functionality. I use an astrophography imaging tool called PixInsight and it's very parallel math heavy. It supports CUDA, and you can offload some tasks to the GPU and it makes a world of difference (computing a mask of stars takes seconds instead of 5-15 minutes). It's certainly got me locked into NVIDIA.
Kind of. Vendor lock-in is only a part of why it's the only game in the town. Another, larger part is that AMD's software support is awful, and also that ATI/AMD were ignoring GPGPU/ML stuff for a while, letting Nvidia indoctrinate academia into using their stack.