I think the best deals were either during "October Prime Day" or Cyber Monday. Prices of the few things I was tracking have mostly gone back to normal, now. Most deals you find would probably be on lower-demand items that the retail/e-tail channel are trying to clear out.
I last built a PC for myself 16 months ago. Building the exact same PC will now cost MORE even though everything is much older. There are no deals. Solid state hasn't changed in price. Spinning rust has actually gone up. GPUs have gone UP?
This timing is the key thing, though. 16 months ago was back when the industry was still in the post-pandemic hangover. That artificially depressed prices below what they would normally be, especially in storage. GPUs were also suffering from a crypto crash, around that time.
AMD chips haven't changed price and only the overly hot Intel mid-range CPUs have dropped. Has the entire industry stagnated?
That's an interesting question. While price reductions on legacy nodes have seemed to continue, I think there's a longer overlap before transistors on newer process nodes achieve price parity with the older ones. We see this mostly with GPUs, but it should also be apparent in DRAM and (to a lesser extent, due to its 3D structure) NAND.
Add to that, the AI-driven demand for the newer nodes, and that should either keep CPUs and GPUs on older nodes for longer, or will make them even more expensive on newer ones.
I think it's very telling that Nvidia's Blackwell is staying on a N4-family node. Intel's Battlemage is staying on N6, and I'd guess AMD's RX 8000 will probably be on N4P? It's not for lack of progress on TSMC's part, I guess it's just not economical to bring these large dies to the consumer market on newer nodes.