Pricing – Let’s Stop Complaining About It
While it ended up being $100 lower than we anticipated, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti’s $799 price will still anger a lot of people. We have a xx70 card with a higher price tag than the last-gen xx80 card, and it doesn’t matter what the performance is (apparently); people will still be outraged by this.
I could theorize that once an RTX 4060/4060 Ti cards is available (in what I hope will be the under-$500 segment), we may finally see the RTX 30 Series put to bed – and with it the price pressure on these higher-performing new parts. Having a $699+ RTX 3080 does not help, but if the market votes against the status quo then who knows what might happen with pricing.
I am, however, growing increasingly tired of the current-gen pricing complaints. AMD was selling their flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT for just $399 a few years ago, and the GTX 1080 Ti was $699. I remember those days, too. However, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon, unless Intel’s next GPU kicks major ass or AMD decides to start a price war.
Maybe, just maybe, we can accept that high-end GPUs are expensive niche products right now (as they once were), and the era of $699 flagships is over. Things cost more than they used to now, as I keep learning every time I go shopping for anything. If expensive computer add-in boards don’t sell then decisions will have to be made about their price, and the economic viability of continuing to produce them.
Enough about pricing. It’s annoying to pay more for things. Every single thing at the hardware store is double what I last paid for it whenever I need to fix something around the house. No one wants to hear me complain about the cost of PVC pipe or electrical wire, but I have started to accept that the buying power of a dollar is about half of what it used to be.