Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs The "progress" of AI PCs is being "overshadowed" by enterprises concerned about the state of the economy and US President-elect Trump's tariff threats for kit made in China, according to market watcher and number cruncher IDC. Shipments edged up 1.8 percent to 68.9 million units in calendar Q4, with Lenovo, up 4.8 percent, …
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One of the big blind spots of the Trumps of this world is that they can't get their heads around the fact that there are a lot of other countries in the world. We're likely the biggest single market but we're not the only market, in fact we're only a relatively small part of the total global market. So depriving us of something isn't going to hurt 'them' anything like as much as it would hurt us.
If you follow economic and political news closely you'd notice that the real reason for tariffs is revenue. There's a push to make the 2017 temporary tax cuts permanent (they'll expire this year) and a revenue source is needed to offset the cost of these tax cuts. (Most of us aren't really aware of those tax cuts because they overwhelmingly favored corporations and the well off.) Tariffs are effectively a form of Federal sales tax but its couched in terms like 'saving American jobs' and stuff like that to make it sound as if the advocates are doing us all a favor.
He's even talked about getting rid of the income tax and going with just tariffs. I have no idea how high they'd have to be, and what that would do the economy but it would be bad. But that might be a good thing in the long. If Trump just makes things worse but not worse in a way people feel is measurably different than the post-covid inflation was they'll give him a pass when he inevitably starts lying "we had no idea how bad things really were, Biden was covering up a lot of stuff" to cover for the fact that he has no plan to do anything that would make things better for anyone not making multiple millions a year in income.
But if he totally craters the economy in a way that no one can mistake has his fingerprints all over it, like dropping income taxes and going all tariff, people will finally take up about him and more importantly about MAGA republicans. By voting all his enablers out of office (wouldn't matter too much whether for democrats or republicans who won't bend the knee to him) he'd lose most of his power and they'd be able to fix things by overriding his veto.
The thing I think would be worst for us is if he just makes things slowly worse over time, but not bad enough that people wake up and realize he's a con man out for himself and not for the "little guy" he's fooled into voting for him. When something has been rotting and slowly falling apart for years it is a lot harder to fix than it if just falls over all at once and the fix is obvious - to undo whatever changed to cause it to fall over.
Its not really "Made in the UK". Maybe assembled in the UK but the parts its assembled from are imported and, as you may have noticed, we (the US) have claimed some kind of overall control over ARM processors because we 'own' the process that they're built by, licensed or whatever.
What will really shake things free is a RPi like device that's a RISC-V. They actually exist at the moment but the RISC-V ecosystem isn't as well developed as the ARM. Yet. The appearance of a viable, US-proof, alternative ecosystem will likely crumble control over the ARM ecosystem. I can see how this will go together, it doesn't require any great insight or clairvoyance, just an understanding of typical industry development timescales, something that (unfortunately) our government officials and politicians seem to be clueless about.
Remember what happened with encryption. We 'owned' it and proceeded to require everyone to dance to our tune (and that even got down to the level of WPA encryption -- you used to have to get an export license for WiFi access points until we stopped making them because everyone + dog was doing it cheaper). The result is obvious -- its an algorithm so it just migrated to "Anywhere but America". This is the writing on the wall -- for those who want to read it.
Speaking as the owner of several pis, ranging from the original B to the Pi 5, I'd buy a 3 to 5 year old laptop for general computing use instead and stick linux on it. (Better value for your money than a pi 5 with an nvme base and ssd, monitor, power supply etc.)
My raspberry pis *do* get used, for home assistant (Pi 5), a 3d printer monitoring camera (original 1st generation pi) as a print server (1st gen pi again) a pi zero W running tvheadend with a TV hat and a couple running OSMC (pi 3 and pi 4)
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