Alongside the price rise announcement, Microsoft pointed to Buy Now, Pay Later options that break up your payments, as well as interest free financing. It’s also working with retailers to make second-hand consoles available at lower prices, it said.
In all seriousness, if you can't come up with the cost of a console, do not buy it (a) using an unsecured loan (b) in the middle of a short period of time where you know that the price is elevated. If things are that tight, then that's just a terrible use of money.


For computer hardware, it's uncommon to see major increases
computer hardware has consistently seen dramatic long-term declines
but it does happen. The other major incident I can think of was 15 years back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods
EDIT: Oh, right, and the cryptocurrency thing drove up some GPU prices for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU_mining
I think that it was more ASICs outperforming GPUs that wound up killing that off.