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Comment by spencerflem | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to buy a laptop yesterday and the ones reviewed three months ago as "best laptop under $1000" are all $1500

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I tried using https://camelcamelcamel.com/ to find some examples of this, but no luck spotting obvious price increases.

Curious what brand you were looking at?

yeah, 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.

I 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?

Well, 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.

It'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?

Maybe its just the two I was looking at, but the Dell G16 was on a best under $1k list and is $1600 on best buy, and my almost brand new Zephirus G14 that got killed by a spill (rest in peace) went from $1200 when i got it to $1700 on best buy as well.

Acer Nitro V kept its price at what the reviews said and that's what I ended up getting, but still weird that 2 of 3 changed

Are you sure you are looking at the exact same configs? I looked up both G16 and Zephyrous 14 and on Keepa.com their price hasn't moved that much. The notable exception is that their prices dropped quite a bit for Amazon's President's day sale, but both of those had prices hold steady (i.e. within the +-10% range) since then.

Possibly not, I was doing this in a pretty big hurry & was frustrated. Apologies if this was all FUD

I'm the cofounder of https://PriceLasso.com where we do price tracking and price drop alerts on 150+ sites, and so far seeing little in the way of price increases.

Some news sites reported Logitech products went up in price, but from we can see these are normal seasonal patterns.

Ah, maybe it was just unlucky timing then.

I 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.

I'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.

How is that for European buyers?

Same price or down slightly.

This 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.

Obviously yes this will happen. Trade restrictions always results in more smuggling and black market activity.

Of 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?

I'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/desk...

entry level macbook air (m4) is same price as it used to be (in luxembourg): 1 159,36 €

I mean VAT here is significantly higher than the equivalent sales taxes in the US, so stuff is almost always more expensive.

You can get VAT refunded if you're only passing through [0]

[0]https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/vat...

In Sweden: have not noticed any big swing in prices, either up or down.

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