Yes we all get older, some of us wealthier and yes its much easier to just pay someone else to do it for you and more convenient.
Once Intel haven no supply issues in a few months time, prices will have more a sense of normality, so right now you either want it and pay the extra, you want it but can't afford or justify it or its the same old of people complaining about something they had no intention of ever purchasing anyway.
Those who want it will just buy it or wait a few months, or simply buy something else like 2700X, 1950X or even something like 8700K which we have in stock at £419.99, not cheap but at least in stock and cheaper than other UK shops.
But the issue in a few months,news of 7NM Zen and 10NM Intel CPUs will start to leak out,so unless you are the kind of person who buys a new CPU every generation,an 8C CPU for £600 is not going to look so hot any more. The fact is Intel dug its own hole and made its own bed,so it needs to lie in it. If they really cared,instead of loosing $3.5 billion on a pointless McAfee purchase they should be helping retailers out to keep prices lower,but they don't care either way.
One of my clients has already shifted their intel stock after the downgrade, if I had any I would be worried about it too given the growth of competition. I am not in anyway an intel fanboy if AMD brought out the same chip at the same price it would be down to the motherboards.
I entered into this discussion simply to highlight the real economic/purchasing phenomenon of acceptability of price acceleration during the retail transaction - that is when people are already committed to spend money 'topping up' that cost with extra services, upgrades etc. takes place in every market sector and is highly effective. Probably best examples are cars and hotels. But regardless my point was those that are already in the market to upgrade or replace their systems 1/2/300 quid may not be a large sum in this market niche.
I was trying to get across the very human emotion of "oh go on then" and this was interpreted as me being some kind of intel fanboy or hater of the poor.
The market bears what the market bears.
I will take your point that the majority of wealthier people are not going to be on an enthusiast internet forum - I was scratching my head about it though with people being in this game for decades and still not being able to divest themselve of the value proposition/vias/itch (or whatever you want to call it) that we had as students.
Because remember,most people on a tech forum are gamers or average computing folk,and if you look at all measurement metrics from Steam,JPR,Mercury Research,etc it shows you very few are at the top end of either.
Remember,the Intel price increase is not just another "top end CPU",its a consumer CPU with an IGP and in terms of the cost,it is the biggest increase in price for an Intel consumer socket CPU in years,and the Core i9 will eventually help push up the price of much cheaper CPUs.
This is NOT good,as it will only mean it will slowdown the adoption of newer CPUs,or lead to the average gamer just keeping the CPUs longer. If you look at phones this is what is happening,ie, now it seems the average lifespan has increased to nearly 3 years,meaning the companies to maintain margins push the price higher and it leads to people keeping them longer,so they up the price more. Its a vicious circle. If they had made bigger improvements and/or kept prices lower or consistent,more people will have upgraded quicker and longterm it probably would mean more stability.
This also affects development of consumer software - why bother pushing stuff to use more cores,etc when most of the market is still on old stuff?? If you are a dev you want to target maximum sales.
Also,as I indicated earlier if Intel was really in some major financial issue it might be something,but Intel has made so many poor decisions,and only their size and entranched nature has helped them and those decisions would have sunk many other companies. The $3.5 billion loss on McAfee and the billions of dollars in contra-revenue were funded from them milking smaller and smaller desktop/laptop chips for more and more money from consumers,and in the end they are a big enough company to know how to manage their own factories. Who asked them to push chipsets to 14NM when they knew 10NM was not ready for mass production of desktop CPUs?? Who asked them to make loads of modems for Apple when they knew there were issues with 10NM and not enough 14NM capacity?? Who asked them to shut down 14NM fabs?? They knew very well that die sizes were going up as they added moar cores to combat AMD.
Usually we have a facepalm at AMD not knowing what its right and left hands are doing,but there seems to be some serious issues for such an old company to screw up like this.
