2020 in Hardware: The Year Everything Sold Out
A look back at how nearly every major hardware category — consoles, GPUs, CPUs, and even Macs — ended 2020 impossible to buy.
Take stock of what you were actually able to buy this year without jumping through hoops, camping a Discord server, or paying a scalper markup, and the list is embarrassingly short. Whatever category of consumer tech you were interested in in 2020, odds are it was sold out.
Start with consoles. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X launched to real demand and immediately vanished from shelves. Retailers ran through allocations in minutes, restocks turned into a recurring event people set alarms for, and plenty of shoppers are heading into the new year still without a next-gen box under the tree.
Graphics cards told the same story. Nvidia’s RTX 30-series was supposed to be the generational leap PC gamers had been waiting years for, and by most accounts the cards deliver — when you can find one at anything close to list price. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips landed to strong reviews and the same fate: limited quantities, instant sellouts, and a secondary market charging a premium for the privilege of skipping the line.
Even Apple wasn’t immune. The first M1 Macs, arguably the most interesting laptops Apple has shipped in years, have been running into their own stock constraints through the holiday season.
Why now, specifically
None of this is really one company’s failure. The common thread running underneath consoles, GPUs, and laptops alike is a pandemic-strained manufacturing base that simply can’t flex to meet demand the way it normally would. Factories are running with reduced capacity and safety protocols, logistics networks are strained, and semiconductor supply chains that were already tight got tighter. Specifically, a GDDR6 memory crunch has been squeezing GPU makers, since that’s the memory both Nvidia and AMD lean on for their latest cards — and it’s not something you can just manufacture more of on short notice when the whole industry is drawing from the same limited pool of fabrication capacity.
Layer on top of that a pandemic year where people are stuck at home, gaming and upgrading rigs instead of going out, and you get demand spiking at the exact moment supply is most constrained. It’s a genuinely bad combination, and not one that resolves itself quickly.
Analysts covering the space aren’t expecting relief soon. The consensus heading into January is that these shortages persist well into next year, possibly deep into 2021, before manufacturing catches up to demand. If you’re hoping to build a new PC or grab a next-gen console as a new year’s resolution, it might be worth resetting expectations now. The hardware you want exists — it’s just going to take patience, luck, or an unhealthy amount of refresh-button clicking to actually get your hands on it.