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The many ways tarrifs will hit electronics
- spencerflem 1y agoI was trying to buy a laptop yesterday and the ones reviewed three months ago as "best laptop under $1000" are all $1500
- amelius 1y agoHow is that for European buyers?
- zorked 1y agoSame price or down slightly.
- ajmurmann 1y agoThis touches on something I'm curious to see play out: How much shopping tourism will we see? If a laptop costs twice as much due to tariffs (as indicated by the forecast in the article) how many US consumers will wait with buying a new laptop or phone till they happen to be in another country? I'm also curious if we'll see a huge spike in smuggling which might give more justification for more spending on border security.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoObviously yes this will happen. Trade restrictions always results in more smuggling and black market activity.
- ajmurmann 1y agoOf course it will happen. I'm curious to what degree. Will 50% of US iPhone sales move abroad? Will smuggling of regular goods become a bigger deal than fentanyl smuggling?
- keyringlight 1y agoI'm interested to see how this affects Microsoft's messaging to some win10 users for "you need to buy a new PC to continue to be updated" while there's still a significant [0] amount of people to switch in 5-6 months. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/ https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
- c-fe 1y agoentry level macbook air (m4) is same price as it used to be (in luxembourg): 1 159,36 €
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoI mean VAT here is significantly higher than the equivalent sales taxes in the US, so stuff is almost always more expensive.
- jorge-d 1y agoYou can get VAT refunded if you're only passing through [0] [0]https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/vat/index_en.htm#inline-nav-2 https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/vat...
- piva00 1y agoIn Sweden: have not noticed any big swing in prices, either up or down.
- cj 1y agoI tried using https://camelcamelcamel.com/ https://camelcamelcamel.com/ to find some examples of this, but no luck spotting obvious price increases. Curious what brand you were looking at?
- square_usual 1y agoyeah, I don't buy it either. I haven't seen any major price rises in the products I frequently check out. I'm assuming they're selling stock that's already in the US and don't have to pay tariffs on.
- ajmurmann 1y agoI assume this is true as well and am at the same time surprised by it. I'd have increased prices or held on to inventory as soon as I know the tariff rate and I know when it's coming. Even if I bought a laptop for $750 and can now sell it for $1000 the prospect of the market price for it going up to $1,500 or even $2,000 and turning a much larger profit is quite enticing. Maybe prices being fairly stable is a sign of low confidence in the tariffs?
- square_usual 1y agoWell, you'd be betting that people would still be willing to buy at $1,500 or $2,000. When prices go up that much, demand tends to drop, and for what are essentially toys might even go down to 0. So you'd risk holding on to inventory, and with the 90 day reprieve and the market shocks you might be willing to bet that in a few months there might not be tariffs at all.
- crazygringo 1y agoIt's more that you have bills to pay now, and it costs money to warehouse things. Do you have enough cash around to sell nothing for the next two months and keep paying employees and bills? Are you absolutely certain you'll make more than enough profit in the end to offset that? Are consumers going to hate you for it and is that going to harm your brand?
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- 999900000999 1y agoI brought all my toys the moment these policies were announced. Case in point. I don't *need* a new Surface , but I saw one for like 500$ off. I don't imagine being able to find one at a reasonable price during the next few years. Really China is still playing softball here. They could just ban exports to the US tomorrow and we'll be the ones cut off from any moderately advanced technology.
- polski-g 1y agoI'm in the market for a new laptop, a new TV, a new car, and a bunch of plywood and tools. I will be buying nothing until the tariffs are gone. No point in paying 10-250% tariffs when I can just wait Trump out.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, my electronics hobbies are probably severely curtailed. I am assuming that the cancelling the de minimus exception is the real killer. I assume I can no longer afford PCBWay, AliExpress. Recent purchases I am not likely to be able to afford: NVIDIA TESLA M40 cards from China I found on eBay and a "mining rig" mother board from AliExpress. (Was putting together a, formerly, inexpensive local-Llama rig.) To be sure, these are things I don't need but they were on the cusp of affordability from the point of view of a hobbyist and so I indulged — and I will not now because they will now cross that threshold. And I expect to see the price double on my Zenni glasses going forward. I used to like to find old medium-format cameras from Asian countries on eBay (probably not now). I already bailed on purchasing what would have been my first drone with what has happened to the prices on them.
- alabastervlog 1y agoSuper bummed out about the glasses thing, too. So nice to have glasses that were cheap enough it wasn't that big a deal when a pair got destroyed for some reason, but also didn't look like shit.
- sokoloff 1y agoShipping is not tariffed, so I expect that hobby PCBs will still be affordable. ($2 PCBs becoming $5 is hardly a deal-breaker.) Aliexpress I expect will adapt to end (or at least sharply curtail) free shipping promotions and start charging for shipping (which will not be tariffed), which better aligns what you’re actually paying for anyway. So, getting 100 transistors for $1.02 and free shipping with $10 total might not be a thing any more, but $0.25 for those transistors and $0.75 for shipping with a $10 minimum might be (and is probably closer to the true economics than $1 and free shipping via airplane).
- alabastervlog 1y agoCheck out the planned minimum per-item fees for low-value (sub-$800) shipments planned when de minimus is rescinded for China. They're.... high.
- fabbari 1y ago
- gramie 1y agoI checked the article just to see if the IEEE actually spelled "tariffs" wrong (they didn't).
- mindslight 1y agoLet's just call it what it is - a national sales tax. The only way significant bottom-up manufacturing ecosystems would come back to the US would be through targeted government investment, long term stability, and effective anti-trust enforcement - all things beyond the current administration. If three decades of economic neoliberalism was a steamroller crushing our industrial base, the Trumpist solution is to just throw it in reverse and destroy what domestic industry had managed to spring up in its wake. I would have thought that despite the general comfort with hypocrisy of the larger Republican party, they would at least have reacted against overtly raising taxes especially to levels of hundreds of percent. But nope, use one synonym and whatever Dear Leader says goes. It's truly a cult.
- andsoitis 1y agoTariffs are also fertile ground for corruption.
- energy123 1y agoCase in point: Apple's exemption
- litoE 1y agoTariffs motivate smuggling. Smugglers corrupt the government's tax authorities so they will look the other way. Consumers who buy the cheaper product know full well it's smuggled goods. Conclusion: tariffs corrupt all of society. I saw this first hand growing up in South America with tariffs on all imported goods.
- carlosjobim 1y agoHow many American houses are built in China? How much American rice is grown in China? How much American lumber is chopped in China? How much American electricity is produced in China?
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- jmclnx 1y agoI wonder if this will heat up the used market. In Oct Windows 10 will go EOL unless you start paying M/S. For windows 11 many people will need new hardware. I wonder if M/S will pull back on their requirements. Of course people could move to Linux :)
- wing-_-nuts 1y agoI've honestly never understood the point of the tariffs. 1. They're massively unpopular and likely to cause electoral losses in '26 and '28 which will immediately undo them 2. Consumers know the tariffs will likely cause a recession, and will likely be undone in 4y. Pretty much every major spending purchase that can be delayed, will. 3. Companies know 4y is not enough time to invest in new supply chains or new manufacturing plants. Given sinking demand they will shed jobs and hunker down for the duration. I can tell you, for myself? Any major purchases are now off the table. I will happily keep my 18 year old car running instead of buying a new honda civic. I'm perfectly content with the devices I currently have. I will root and install a third party rom instead of buying a new phone. My 3090 will happily play old / AA games for the duration. Travel will likely be reduced thanks to the weak dollar and anti us sentiment in general.
- Workaccount2 1y agoTrump wants to get rid of income taxes for those earning under $150k. He most likely intends to pull out the financial pillar of income tax, and replace it with tariffs. He is likely waiting for the price crunch to blow up so he can step in an give everyone the "gift" of no income tax.
- piva00 1y agoIt would only make sense if consumption of tariff-imposed goods would keep steady to make up for the loss of income taxes, with consumer confidence cratering there's no way consumption keeps steady. On top of that you have inflation which will cause the Fed to raise interest rates, further lowering credit offering for consumption, bond yields raising which costs more of the budget for interest payment, requiring more taxes, it's a stupid plan all around...
- andsoitis 1y agoIncome taxes are progressive while tariffs are regressive, so those under $150k are likely to be worse off.
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- andsoitis 1y ago> China could continue to produce smartphones for Europe, Asia, and Latin America. And Africa. Asia and Africa are at the forefront of mobile money adoption.
- mytailorisrich 1y agoYes. Google says " in March 2025, the top five smartphone brands in Africa by market share were Samsung (29.86%), Apple (14.11%), Tecno (13.65%), Infinix (6.62%), and Huawei (6.29%) [Xiaomi and other smaller brands make up the remaining share] ". So basically, Chinese brands have a 56% market share in Africa (1.5 billion people and probably the market with the most growth reserve).
- jameslk 1y ago> The estimates become highly dependent on how influential China is for final assembly. The article mentions this but then doesn’t go much further into it. But this will likely be the biggest factor with tariffs. China will still produce the electronics and many other goods, but then the goods will be shipped to another country for “substantial modifications” before being shipped to the US to evade the US tariffs on China
- simonebrunozzi 1y agotypo in the title: tarrifs should be tariffs.
- energy123 1y agoThese tariffs will have a deindustrializing effect for complex goods. - Exemptions for electronics - Unemployment at 4%, no labor to work in factories - Raw inputs now 10%+ more expensive, meaning worse international competitiveness - Policy uncertainty deterring investment
- Whoppertime 1y agoLooking at the labor force participation rate it seems like there is a lot of labor to work in the factories U-3, the official unemployment rate only includes people who were actively looking for a job in the last 4 weeks. Meaning if you've been out of work for half a year and you stopped sending resumes the last 4 weeks (because none of the local employers are responding to your resume) you are not included in the unemployment rate