I got my 1950x for $699 a few months ago. Its been $699 for a while at Microcenter.

The "price-competitive" i9-7900x is 10-cores for $799, and seems to be the best price-competitive comparison. Better single-thread, better at AVX512 tasks, but weaker in general purpose multithreading due to having fewer cores.

Eh its just a matter of patience I guess. I got mine for $799 in December.

"And it is still $960 on Newegg"

As of 2018-06-11 18:27 PDT (when I clicked on that link) the current Newegg price is $799.99.