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Published in PC Hardware

Tech prices go up in the US

by on26 September 2018


Trump weighted tariffs start to bite

President Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump’s tariffs have started to affect the price of tech goods across the pond.

Gigabyte has recently got in touch with it’s ‘valued partners’ to warn that there is a 10 percent tariff imposed on a host of different imports from China, and that will increase from January 1, 2019, up to a hefty 25 percent.

The full tariff list covers 5,745 different items – with 297 taken off the original list, including tech like smartwatches and Bluetooth devices.

Overall, US people should be pleased with their PC at the moment because it is going to be expensive to upgrade.

Gigabyte’s notice lists all the different PC products that are going to suffer from the tariffs the US government is imposing, with only notebooks, keyboards, memory, and headsets left out.

Gigabyte points to the government also imposing the tariffs on SSDs.  Motherboards, graphics cards, coolers, PSUs, chassis, and chairs are all going to see a price rise for anyone buying hardware in the US.

It has been suggested that some companies will move their manufacturing wholesale into Taiwan to avoid Trump’s tax and will switch back to their original pricing model once that happens.

All this means that rather than the US benefiting from the tariffs because US companies like Apple will have to move back, other countries which are not China will benefit.

Meanwhile, the US people who voted for Trump will end up having to pay much more for their tech. Still, there will be little sympathy from Europe; US tech companies have been charging us more than the US for a while now.

 

Last modified on 26 September 2018
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