Happy New Year 2021 from Hardware Asylum

Myself and everyone here at Hardware Asylum would like to wish you a Happy New Year.  The world is a changed place by now everyone knows about the 2020 Pandemic and what it did to the world economy.  As a result, world travel has come to a halt and lockdowns prevented people from attending work, school and friends.  Despite the global trouble operations at Hardware Asylum continued and for the second time ever, the podcast was recorded “virtually” with video editions giving listeners a slightly different look into what it takes to plan and record content.

One thing that did change was computer hardware.  The spring time lockdown prevented shipments of components and created worldwide shortages of everything from cases and coolers to video cards and processors.  I spent several days attempting to buy a Threadripper 3 only to later find out the processor was overhyped and under preformed.  The new NVIDIA RTX 30 Series was handled poorly and while I think there were alternative motives behind this the massive price drop and filtered benchmark numbers caused demand to skyrocket. 

Overall, this is not a bad thing for NVIDIA or the Crypto Miners who bought up the available cards.  It just makes things difficult for the rest of us.

Welcome to 2021, I hope this year serves you well and, if you voted for Pedro, then shame on you.  (read my post from last year to know why)

It will be weird to skip CES this year.  Due to the “situation” the show has gone 100% virtual and I decided to just send emails off to my mfg partners asking again for their support. 

Happy New Year