Spent about ninety minutes on Newegg last night trying to buy a graphics card and came away with nothing. Not because I couldn't decide what to get. Because there was basically nothing left to decide between. The GTX 1060 listings were either "out of stock" or priced like they were GTX 1080s. RX 570s and 580s, same story, and the ones that were technically in stock had jumped fifty or sixty bucks over what they were going for back in March.
I know exactly why, and it's annoying enough that I have to write about it. Ethereum has been on an absolute tear the last couple months, up from something like eight bucks back in January to well past $300 now, and every miner with a spreadsheet and a garage has figured out that stacking six RX 580s on an open-air rig prints money faster than the card itself costs. My buddy Dave (not his real name, he'd kill me) has four rigs running in his basement right now, twenty-four cards total, and he's only half joking when he says his electric bill is a rounding error compared to what he's pulling in. Good for him, genuinely. Bad for me, a person who just wanted to replace a three-year-old 970 so I could play Prey at more than 45 frames a second.
The part that gets me is how fast it happened. This wasn't a slow squeeze. One month the cards were sitting there at MSRP, the next month they were gone, and the month after that "gone" turned into "back in stock but $80 more." I've seen component shortages before, PS4 launch, the first few months of the 1080, but those were about actual demand for the thing the card does. This is demand for a completely different thing that happens to run on the same silicon. Weird timeline we're in.
WWDC week, briefly
Also, this was WWDC week, which means everyone with a tech blog spent Monday through Wednesday live-blogging a keynote, and I'm not going to pile on with another "here's everything Apple announced" post because you've already read six of those by now. Two things stuck with me though. First, the HomePod. $349, doesn't ship until December, and Apple's whole pitch was about sound quality over the smart-assistant stuff, which is a strange way to walk into a category where the Echo's been sitting at $99-$179 for two years already building habits. I get that it's aimed at people who care about audio first, but December feels like a long runway for something that got a keynote slot in June.
Second, the iPad Pro losing the 9.7-inch size in favor of a new 10.5-inch model. I've had the 9.7 since it came out and it's basically perfect for what I use it for, which is mostly reading in bed and taking notes in meetings I should be paying more attention to. The new one sounds nice on paper: thinner bezels, ProMotion, the 120Hz display, but I'm not thrilled about the size creeping up every generation. My 9.7 fits in a jacket pocket if the jacket's cut generously. I doubt the 10.5 will.
Anyway. Back to the card situation, because it's actually costing me money and not just mild irritation. I ended up not buying anything, which was the right call I think, but it means I'm stuck running Prey on medium settings until either the mining craze cools off or I decide to just pay the scalper tax like everyone else. Micro Center over on the east side apparently had a small restock Tuesday morning and it was gone by lunch. A guy in the parking lot literally told me that when I pulled in around 1pm, shrugged, and drove off. That's the market working exactly as designed, I guess, just not for me.
If you're in the same boat: check Micro Center in person rather than online, their site doesn't always reflect what's actually on the shelf, and go early. Real early. Like, before-your-coffee early. I didn't, and here we are.