But you still have a shortage, right? People still want microchips. In ideal conditions, the price will stabilize at the level where every chip gets sold, but nobody who wants to pay that price has to wait in line for too long. But if you reach that point, you still have a whole lot of buyers who still want a microchip, but who are unable to pay for them at those elevated prices - i.e a shortage.
With fuel, you can reduce your car usage for a while and when prices get back down you can just go back to your old level of fuel consumption. But with microchips, a reduction in "consumption" results in pent-up demand; people who have been waiting a while to buy a new GPU still want to buy that GPU when the prices go down.
The idea is that if you need it bad enough, you can find one at the higher price. If prices didn’t go up, you wouldn’t be able to find one at any price.
Some of the people who would want a chip at $x don’t want it at $x*2, and will just never buy one unless the price drops. If the price never drops because supply is never increased, then they will simply never purchase it.
Well, a lot of people would buy yachts if they were only $1000.... since the price will never get there, they will never get their yacht that they want.
Does that mean there is a yacht shortage?
If chip costs stay high, that just means that is how expensive chips are.
So what's your definition of a shortage then? We're in a situation where a lot of people who want microchips aren't able to buy them because the suppliers aren't able to produce enough of them. What is the difference between that and a shortage?
If we don't produce enough food for everyone to eat, we would be in a similar situation: the price would rise until only the people with the most money could afford food. We would call that a food shortage. Replace food with microchips and that's still a shortage, right? (Albeit a less dire one.)
Or do you follow an ideology where there is no such thing as a shortage, there is only the almighty supply and demand curve?
EDIT: To respond to the yacht thing: It's my understanding that the price of yacths aren't elevated because we're unable to produce enough of them. It is my understanding that yachts are expensive A) because producing them genuinely requires a lot of resources and B) because they're luxury goods which are priced according to their target market. If loads and loads of people suddenly started demanding yachts at their current price, and yacht factories weren't able to keep up with the demand, and the price of a yacht went up significantly due to supply constraints, I would certainly call that a "yacht shortage".
The tl;dr is that a shortage is when there are people who are willing to pay more than the market price for an item but something is preventing the market from raising prices.. either because of laws against price gouging, price caps, or because manufacturers have some other incentive not to raise prices.
So to be clear: You wouldn't consider my food shortage example to be a "shortage", as long as nothing is preventing the market from raising prices to meet the demand?
Because if that's the case, then that's okay. We're not actually disagreeing on anything substantial, we're just using different definitions of the word "shortage". It seems like this is perfectly summed up by this paragraph from the wikipedia page you linked:
> In common use, the term "shortage" may refer to a situation where most people are unable to find a desired good at an affordable price, especially where supply problems have increased the price. "Market clearing" happens when all buyers and sellers willing to transact at the prevailing price are able to find partners. There are almost always willing buyers at a lower-than-market-clearing price; the narrower technical definition doesn't consider failure to serve this demand as a "shortage", even if it would be described that way in a social or political context (which the simple model of supply and demand does not attempt to encompass).
It would seem like calling the chip shortage a "shortage" is completely within the common usage of that term.
With fuel, you can reduce your car usage for a while and when prices get back down you can just go back to your old level of fuel consumption. But with microchips, a reduction in "consumption" results in pent-up demand; people who have been waiting a while to buy a new GPU still want to buy that GPU when the prices go down.