I'm curious others thoughts on when (or perhaps if) this supply issue with chips and GPUs comes to an end. I have to think it will at some point, but I don't follow PC stuff much.
Reasoning is I'm trying to solve a dilemma. I was about to sell off my old Radeon card, I only replaced it because the fan was noisy. I fixed the fan, then got distracted and let it sit in a drawer. Now I'm in drawer clean out phase. So I put it in my PC to test it. The thing is, it is still more than enough graphics card for me and I've got a friend offering me $100 more than I paid for my GTX 1660 in December 2019. I think they are fucking insane myself (it's not even a good card), but the prices check out when I look online.
So, I'm thinking about selling it, because I'm pretty much only a couch/TV/console gamer. I may convert to PC and build a totally new HTPC when my Xbox wears out it's welcome, but we are talking 2023-ish. I can't imagine I'd even want a GTX 1660 in 2023. Do we think it will still be impossible to get hardware by then?
I have no special knowledge except from what the supply chain people at my employer have said regarding shortages and how they are (attempting to) manage them. Do with this information what you will.
Supply chains have gotten really "lumpy" as opposed to the Just In Time supply chain that has been the way things have worked for the past 30-40 years. Since the shortages have increased the uncertainty around being able to obtain certain parts when they're needed, companies have started buying and taking delivery of a lot more of the parts and warehousing them in a way they haven't really done for quite a long time. So where a company might normally buy and take delivery of X parts, now they're placing orders for X * 10 so they have some buffer to be able to handle a future scenario where they can't get the parts in a timely manner but still have to make their deliveries.
In the short term this means there's going to be shortages because companies are buying way more than they need, and basically every company is doing this to some extent; so you have this severe over-reaction to the shortages that ends up prolonging the shortage. It's basically like what happens when someone slams their brakes on the highway: the driver behind does the same thing but a little bit more so, and the driver behind him but a little bit more, and so on until you've created a traffic jam a mile behind the initial guy who slammed his brakes.
The hope is that over time this will smooth itself out again, as companies make fewer (larger) orders and start to use their inventory and manufacturers produce more parts to build up their own inventory. But of course we've never turned off a global economy before, so who knows if what they hope will happen will actually happen.
That would be true in my work too. The stuff I buy isn't really things a consumer would use, but we've sort of been piling it up a bit to the point our supply chain is getting thin. That's not super unusual in my industry though, as it's all specialized tech stuff so often times they just don't plain predict and manufacture enough of it.
We have a mixture of consumer and specialized. The thing we're really getting nailed on is custom cables: the supplier has gone from a 30 day lead time on certain cables to a 6 month lead time. Hence why orders are 5-10x as large.