Microsoft has announced significant price rises for Xbox consoles, blaming the ongoing “components crisis.”

Xbox console price rises June 2026:

Xbox Series S 512GB: $399.99 ---> $499.99  
Xbox Series S 1TB: $449.99 ---> $599.99  
Xbox Series X 1TB Digital: $599.99 ---> $749.99  
Xbox Series X 1TB: $649.99 ---> $799.99 
    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      For computer hardware, it’s uncommon to see major increases — computer hardware has consistently seen dramatic long-term declines — but it does happen. The other major incident I can think of was 15 years back:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods

      Severe flooding occurred during the 2011 monsoon season in Thailand. The flooding began at the end of July triggered by the landfall of Tropical Storm Nock-ten.

      Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives.[77][78] Western Digital was able to get one of their plants, flooded on 15 October 2011, restored and operating on 30 November 2011…As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.[77][80]

      EDIT: Oh, right, and the cryptocurrency thing drove up some GPU prices for a while.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU_mining

      As cryptocurrency miners increased their purchases of GPUs between 2013 and 2017, the prices of GPUs skyrocketed.[7] The increasing demand of GPU mining and purchases caused a worldwide shortage that continued into 2021 until production finally caught up in 2023.[8][9]

      I think that it was more ASICs outperforming GPUs that wound up killing that off.

    • iamthetot@piefed.caOP
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      2 days ago

      I mean, what are you calling modern history? Lots of vintage games are more expensive now than at release.

      • sploosh@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I think they mean products that are not new to the market, but are still actively manufactured.

        • iamthetot@piefed.caOP
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          1 day ago

          Ah that wasn’t clear to me. I can’t remember any consumer electronics getting more expensive while still in production in my lifetime, although if we expand out to other product categories it’s happening all over the past decade or so. Inflation combined with shrinkflation has been making pretty much everything worse value.

          Remember $5 footlongs, 5 for $5 at Arby’s, or the 10 for $10 packs at Taco Bell?