Rebates are definitely normal, but as for your first point, I honestly believe AMD were just going to give them for the launch, and thought they could get away with it. AMDs marketing is so bad, that this makes the most sense to me.
Even a Reference Model wouldn’t have mattered, in this case, because to me, it looks like AMD wanted to be too much like NVIDIA and set the price for the chips too high (which they sell to the partners to make the GPUs). That’s why AMD needs rebates to get the cards actually to MSRP.
As for your third point, it looks like they didn’t just prioritize brick and mortar stores, but only those in the US (see all the posts about Micro Center stock). Another genius move by AMD marketing?
Rebates are definitely normal, but as for your first point, I honestly believe AMD were just going to give them for the launch, and thought they could get away with it. AMDs marketing is so bad, that this makes the most sense to me.
Even a Reference Model wouldn’t have mattered, in this case, because to me, it looks like AMD wanted to be too much like NVIDIA and set the price for the chips too high (which they sell to the partners to make the GPUs). That’s why AMD needs rebates to get the cards actually to MSRP.
As for your third point, it looks like they didn’t just prioritize brick and mortar stores, but only those in the US (see all the posts about Micro Center stock). Another genius move by AMD marketing?