Imagine if people from dubai complained about having to pay import taxes to bring a few extra ferraris into the states, we would call them insane, yet a macbook is likely many months comfortable living in most of mexico.
Says you. When you have a 747 as your personal station wagon, you might bring a few toys along.
The value argument does not hold water to me. Why does the value of two laptops matter, but not the amount of money in my bank account? Why would I go the roundabout way of selling one of my laptops in Mexico, when I have money in my bank account that I can use directly.
The whole system is weird. And it ends up unfairly punishing travellers. When they should be focusing on the big scale stuff.
Because you might be taking advantage of price differences between markets? iPhones are cheaper in Hong Kong than in Mainland China, so people smuggle them to collect the margin gained by avoiding tarifs https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/18/iphone-smuggler-china-hong-ko...
Also, I don’t think European countries in general have particularly good prices at all. If I were to sell one of my MacBooks here I imagine it would actually be at a loss even before you consider the cost of dragging them half way around the world in the first place.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customs_Convention_on_the_Temp...
I doesn't matter if it is an Ferrari just for pleasure or if it is a new machine you bring in for a trade show for your business. The thing is, that you need to make a customs declaration (and not the easy one that you normally do at the airport as a traveller). You do the full declaration including information for which reason you are importing, when you will export it again, including all the tax codes. Then when you leave you need to declare the export.