This, Nvidia competeing against their partners with Nvidia branded boards, and the evga article a few weeks ago make it seem like being in partnership with them must be dreadful.
These card makers now have to sit on inventory and reprint boxes and repackage everything?
Apple dropped Nvidia after Nvidia chips were failing en-masse in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and Nvidia tried to publicly pin the blame on Apple, even though Nvidia chips in laptops by other manufacturers were also failing.
Semiaccurate isn't a reliable/unbiased source at all and shouldn't be cited as a serious source. They're on the level of the UserBenchmarks guy as being sometimes right, but always incredibly hyperbolic and emotionally attached, to the extent that it affects their work.
RoHS solder failing was an endemic problem from that era and affected all products from all brands... for example, there used to be lots of reddit posts about people baking their Radeon 7850 GPUs too.
Apple is just an 800 pound gorilla in every relationship they enter, and they like it that way, and they can use it to try and recover unexpected costs. A lawsuit of opportunity - there would have been no point in anyone suing the near-bankrupt AMD at that point, but NVIDIA had money and it was worth trying to pump them for cash even if it was an industry-wide problem... NVIDIA is part of the industry, right?
The 4080 12gb release date hasn't been announced yet so it's likely that no boxes were printed or packed.
In the long run this is a good move considering how idiotic it is to give the same name to products with different dies and a ~30% performance difference.
You're talking about supply lines across an ocean... that's a lead time of several months... not to mention the time it takes for making injection molds, etc. these cards were already made and badged... They may just be sitting on pallets waiting to be boxed, or may already be in boxes and/or shipped.
At the very least there's probably some recall operations to ship back, take off the shrouds and put on new shrouds for the rebadge, if not also rebox.
Sure, but has anyone started mass production of 4080-12GB cards? Maybe there were no plans to launch it this year. I bet the PCBs have not been attached to the coolers and shrouds yet. If so, they can use the "4080" badged shrouds for 4080-16GB cards and make new shrouds for a late release of the 12GB version.
I'm pretty sure with stock selling in stores in a month, that there's already cards fully assembled, boxed and shipped to US warehouses, or at least on ships headed to the US.
edit: Also, have you ever taken a video card apart and re-assembled it? Even if the components/shroud are reusable for other 3080 (and likely are) this is a lot of labor cost above and beyond any practical waste.
More than that is the injection molded shrouds and backplates on many of the cards in question, not to mention reboxing and recalling existing/shipped inventory.
Most of them just say "GeForce" or "NVIDIA", most brands didn't mold numbers into the shrouds/backplates (because until the launch announcement, they have no idea what the SKU placement for any particular chip will be in the first place).
It's a mess but no need to make it out to be worse than it is, GN already confirmed that NVIDIA is compensating partners etc.
These card makers now have to sit on inventory and reprint boxes and repackage everything?