Step 1 to empowering consumers: Stop calling them consumers.
Locusts are consumers. People are customers.
In this instance the wording was specifically chosen because mindless drones are exactly what a large number of people have been acting like, and continue to act like.
I recently read an interesting discussion on a French forum about the topic of GPU pricing.
On of the posters made the interesting remark that when you look at the price of high-end GPUs, you should not talk about kids wanting to play some games (obviously they are not those who will buy that sort of GPU) but look at the money that adults are ready to spend for their favorite hobby.
Look for example at the cost of a high-end camera, the money spent for car or motorcycles used as hobbies. Or simply at the price of a good road bicycle.
Price for boating, flying small planes, etc....
And when you figure in this the costs of just making these things work over time, you quickly reach and surpass 2000 $/Euros.
I guess that the GPUs are aimed at this sort of customers.
While I wouldn't disagree with this at the high end, because ever since the Titans were introduced there's been super high priced flagships, what we're seeing is a massive increase across the board. In the past AMD brought prices back down by competing on price/perf, but right now they're all too happy to play nvidia's way. I'd imagine this is because they're making a lot more money in enterprise/HPC and would rather use their fab space for that.
I'm disappointed in the marketing and pricing for the 40 series, but what has me dismayed is the low/mid range. These card are poorly priced, and they haven't even gotten back to the MSRP on the nvidia side of things. I haven't spent more than the low $300s for a video card since my GeForce 4 Ti4600 until now, and that's because all of the cards in that price range are horrible values.
This very cynically priced launch is just going to alienate more people and make them turn away or never consider PC gaming in the first place and l find that to be sad. As long as they're making huge margins nothing will change even if they're squeezing people out of the market.
I forget which year it was specifically, but one of the big price raises for the iphone led to lower sales, but apple still made more revenue/profit off of what had been sold. This is what nvidia appears to be doing, and there is only one thing that can stop it: their revenue dropping off a cliff. Only two things can lead to that: competition lowering the price floor (cross fingers Intel by 2024? because AMD shows no indicator they'll do it), or people
not buying video cards from nvidia.