Also, you can use historical data, but it needs to be the correct type of data. In this particular case, sales of high-end NVidia cards. What you can't do is use historical data that includes all cards sold, because we aren't dealing with all cards and as I and others have pointed out, the historical data includes sales from a segment of the market that no longer exists because both AMD and Intel sell APUs with integrated graphics that do the job that the extreme low-end of the market was meant to cover. As we've seen, trying to use it leads to bad arguments.
The claims about normal launch numbers were based on higher end cards. IIRC ,RTX 2080/2080Ti card launch, not lower end cards. That was the only historical data when you made your Apple analogy with orders of magnitude differences, to invalidate the historically typical numbers.
This aspect of the thread evolved from partner/retailer info gathered by people like Steve at GN, indicating that this was not a Paper Launch, supplies were about launch normal, just demand was off the charts.
But many it seems can't accept that and instead find a way to blame NVidia. So it's a paper launch, or a conspiracy to raise prices, or some other nonsense.
Anything but what was reported, that demand side was unprecedented. Even the local stand alone Computer Shop I used to deal with all the time, said they faced their largest demand ever.
Steve from GN was even talking to them later and said that even waiting a month wouldn't have changed much.
It's truly unprecedented demand. Not sure why that is so hard to accept.