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 
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[–] 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

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.

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