Stop telling your friends that nvidia is "better" because you would never buy anything less than a 4090 with your dual income no kids budget. Your buddy's kid can play minecraft on a Rx580, trust me.
That is the problem, isn't it? in the grand scheme of things, $2000 isn't that much for something you will use even in worst case for only 2 years, but likely longer. that is what you pay for rent each month. Add health care and groceries on top and that $2000 barley matters. Or vacations. I could easily afford it (even with kids) but I'm in general "greedy" and not ready to spend that much on a thing that will lose all it's value within a couple years. A car is different as I need it. I don't need a high end gaming pc.
people buying high end was always limited, in numbers and there will be enough buyers to keep the top part prices high and sell them out. that then leads to the issue that the whole stack must move up in price and there they overdid it. a $2000 halo card alos usable for ML due to large amounts of vram, ok. but the 4080 is too much and has worse performance/dollar. it should be at least $300 cheaper. then the 4070 Ti, same. at least $200 cheaper and so forth. mid-range should easily give us double the performance/dollar. that is were they (AMD,NV) failed us biggest.
It will bite them back. volume will/is going down rapidly. 90% margins are meaningless if you sell just 1 part. Volume matters. Hence why I'm really disappointed with intel. they could have broken this wheel and offered mid-range for low prices forcing AMD and NV to act and also bet more on volume than margins.
NV has the "marketing advantage" so no need to lower prices and go for volume, and AMD makes more money on cpu chiplets than gpu so no really incentive to go into a price war. Intel on the other hand, at least when gpus are in-house are using them to fill their factories. factories that exist anyway for their cpus. intel would be the ideal candidate to go for mid-range (smallish die) volume approach for above reason and to break into the market. But they need a non-broken product with working drivers on-time and not 2 years late.
4070 TI isn't priced that bad (yes it should be cheaper but given the current situation, rest of the stack and used-prices). used 3090s sell for around $800 here and the euro price of the 4070 TI is supposedly $900. if true, makes more sense to get a 4070 Ti than a used 3090 if you do not need the vram for ML. 7900xt here is >$1000 but might make sense given the much higher vram. depends if you want to do 4k or 1440p high-frequency gaming.