With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is not as big problem as rumored?
I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price.
The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive.
Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money.
Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive.
The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage.
The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!
Say you need your truck fixed. It may take months to get the parts needed.
This hasn't played out yet, not even close.
As far as parts availability, I see just as many trucks on the road as ever. If it were widespread that it took months to fix trucks, there would be a huge impact. There’s not.
Do you have actual proof of what you’re talking about?
How so?
Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement.
Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning.
And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.
The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.