Comment by KronisLV

I think it's gonna be like with the price spikes around the time of COVID: corpos complained about the global supply chain disruptions and when all of that was over... just left the prices high up.

It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything.

And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup?

What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.