> It's (a little bit) scummy, because they're selling them on auction, which has a decent chance of flogging them for orders of magnitude more than they'd ordinarily sell them for,
It seems to me that demand is far higher than supply, thus the auction ensures that those who really want them will have a realistic shot of getting one. That's far better than having to resort to buying them from price-gouging scalpers.
Buying them at inflated prices from Intel rewards Intel for being able to make these at all. If they were able to make more of them, they'd be rewarded more.
Paying the inflated prices to scalpers would reward scalpers for hogging the supply. That would be far worse. If I'm going to pay an inflated price for something, I'd rather use it to reward the person making it than some speculator trying to wrench some profit out of a tight market.
> Buying it at inflated prices from Intel effectively rewards them for their inability to produce more.
For this assertion to make any sense you'd need to believe that they don't benefit by increasing sales of a product line, particularly when they increase prices.
Hardly, since the "rejects" will just be sold as the regular model(s).
In the old "lottery" system the rejects would end up on the secondary market, making Intel's final revenue effectively the same as if extreme overclocking wasn't a thing.
