Tariff woes equal US smartphone price hikes, shrinking sales Trump's tariffs may have been ruled unlawful, but they are still in place and continue to affect the market, with the threat of price hikes on smartphones causing prospective buyers to hold off until the situation becomes less volatile. The US Court of International Trade handed out its judgment this week that the Trump …
Honest naming helps. They are taxiffs. And they will be paid by US consumers. I can't imagine US telcos happily cutting their profit margins, because they are really nice guys and love their customers so much. They will recover the extra by less obvious means, whatever up front deals they offer.
And US consumers are used to paying through the nose for everything: phones, internet access, healthcare, flights, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any market segment that isn't dominated by just a few companies thus able to set higher prices.
There are approximately 8 billion people on the planet, so a churn of 1.24 billion represents 15.5% refresh rate per year, which is a vast number of units that are ewaste.
I don't have a smartphone, but if i did i would expect it to last at least 9 years as per my current 2G feature phone.
Isn't it a good idea for mobiles to be supported OS security wise for at least 5 years or more ?
It is a shame that Linux Format has stopped being published, as their features on mobile OSes would always be helpful and welcome to reuse an old mobile out of the security update window.
I don't have a smartphone, but if i did i would expect it to last at least 9 years as per my current 2G feature phone.
You have either the good fortune to live in a juridiction that retained 2G while also moving to 4G+ or more dubiously one where 2G is leading edge (and presumably Korean is widely spoken ;)
In AU these G's are decommissioned faster than the new standards are published. 2G was inhumed many years ago, 3G a fair while ago and now 4G that doesn't support VoLTE was euthenased at the end of 2024.
I must admit, with shame, that I recently fished out a iPhone SE (2016) I purchased† refurbished a few years ago but never used.
I definitely have no love for Apple Co. but the SE, while stuck on ios15, is small, light(ish) and once you locate the silence button and get your head around the "Apple way" it's actually rather easy to use.
If I had purchased a SE in 2017‡ I could still be using it today eight years later. :)
† less than USD60. ‡ ~USD350
Here in the UK 2G is destined to be switched off in 2033 since there are many deployments of B2B or M2M systems.
3G is pretty much switched off now, with 4G and 5G taking over.
The 2G mobile battery lasts 2 weeks easily, so i am reticent to move to a smartphone given how the battery will not last as long - current reports for low usage is 2 to 3 days.
Like the "smart meters", which are 2G in "central and southern areas", which is basically ⅔ of English households. Those will all stop working in 2033.
But don't worry, they only have to replace the communication unit in every smart meter south of a line running roughly Liverpool to Hull, and I'm sure this isn't going to cost four to ten times the claimed saving from installing these outdated units in the first place.
You don't think him and his friends don't know this?
But now people are calling him chicken, it depends on what matters most to him - enriching his friends or his ego. Quite possibly his ego and he might stop chickening out.
I think it is possible that Trump is more of an opportunist by nature. He stirs things up and then decides what he is going to do. This makes him very difficult to predict, and opens him to charges of 'chickening out', but he never really had a fixed plan in the first place. It is a bit like poking a hornet nest and then seeing who gets stung.
It seems the US is lining up to impose "revenge" taxes on foreign individuals and corporations who are tax residents of a "discriminatory foreign country". There are signs that "stealth" disinvestment from the US has already begun by those who don't want to find their US asset holdings subject to random taxation on the same whimsical basis as the TACO tariffs. That would be bad news for an economy that is just about to add a couple of trillion dollars to its debt.
These attempts to demonstrate America's strength in the face of nasty exploitative foreigners have, unfortunately, simply demonstrated how dependent the US is on other countries - China, in particular - making the stuff it needs and lending it the money to support its profligacy. The failure to recognise (or to acknowledge) this is going to cost US citizens dearly.
It seems that the clash of rhetoric and reality is leading inexorably towards a North Korean scenario in which client media and military parades will simply assert that America is now Great Again while closed borders and closed universities will eliminate the main sources of contradictory messages.
We're only at day 130.
‘China - particular - naming the stuff America needs’.
The irony is much of that was driven overseas by Capitalism. The requirement to fuck American’s workers over as too expensive.
Apple’s 3+ decade long build out of South East Asia - esp. China/Foxconn - by Fim Cooke and nurture a $Tn high tech manufacturing ecosystem whilst laying waste to US Tech/Consumer electronics capacity and capabilities.
A Chinese iPhone factory worker employed by Foxconn still gets paid less in a month than a Walmart Curbside scanner and cart pusher gets in a week.
IBM - before the flogged it to Lenovo - had a massive PC Factory in Boca Raton, Fl. Currently IBM are ditching as many US employees as they can get away with and sending the work to IBM India.
Services is the next war - whether to Bangalore or A.I. is still playing out. Although not IBM my entire team and 50 more from an Atlanta based Global EPoS supplier cut and work sent to Bangalore….
Get robbed.
Hilary Clinton may have called the enablers of the FOCF the "deplorables" but it was the "Gullibles," as in his voters that made this sh**show possible.
I wonder how all those "MAGA's on Medicaid*" will cope without it?
Guess they are going to find out.
*As Steve Bannon pointed out.
The reality distortion field is too strong. They will either continue to believe that they get everything they need from their benevolent orange leader or should they cry out that the Orange God has abandoned them their fellow MAGA members will denounce them as unbelievers and expell them from the cult
However will Americans live without their overpriced shiny plastic precious tat!??
This is just cruel! How dare they be robbed of the chance to be, er, continually robbed more than they already are!!! Why the very nerve!!
Me crying a river in sympathy. -------------------------------->>>>>>>>>>>
>there could be 4 percent growth in the average selling prices for smartphones in the US market, but any further negative impact will be reduced by the "unique structure of the US smartphone market,"
By unique it means "extortionate profiteering that people in China don't have to suffer" if 50% extra tarriffs results in 4% price rise
Reported elsewhere that global US based retailers intend to share the tariff induced US price pain with their global operations as to cushion US customers from their full force.
So items incurring a 50% tariff say USD100 (fob) and originally retailed at USD200† would now be USD300 but if you have customers in nations without significant tariff barriers and with populations totalling 900 million (~3× US) you could raise the retail for them by 20% to USD220 and use the "excess" profit to subsidize US prices to USD220 (break even at USD210. ;)
Apart from infecting other economies with US self inflicted inflation such a dubious tactic make local and non US retailers more price competitive and US firm even more vulnerable to the justly deserved global antipathy to all things American.
† in many cases an absurdly low mark up.
This isn't pain-sharing but profit optimisation. If shiny things now cost significantly more in the US than in other countries, a huge black market will open up to take advantage of the inefficiency. I'll have some of that says an unnamed manufacturer of Cupertino and raises prices in other countries. However, this is likely to put it at a competitive disadvantage in those countries where other manufacturers don't follow suit.
I don't see why it would be anti-trust: companies are free to charge whatever they like for their products and this isn't about collusion. International companies already use differential pricing to maximise sales in markets but also pay attention to prevent arbitrage eroding margins in neighbouring ones. For a while, US companies tried to prevent their products being sold in one EU countriy being sold to residents in another, where the products were generally more expensive. They lost all court actions and the surprisingly efficient cross-border traders (no, not Amazon) did the rest.
If people were able to get preferential pricing in say Europe to the detriment of higher prices in the US … I’m sure there would be outcry.
… hey that’s pretty much how the Pharmaceutical market has worked for be last 50 years … though that’s due to the menu detriments of the crazy USA Healthcare ‘system’ than anything actively.
Imaging creating the Healthcare System abortion that costs 2-3 times (per capita) a European-style Universal Healthcare System but has so many people whose life outcomes are terrible..
Get elected spouting rants about how everything is the fault of the most powerless people in the world and government. Once elected start selling bitcoins and gold with the pitch that the government is going to fail, so you better stock up now. Make sure government fails and retire even richer to your private enclaves.
what you might call the "Re-manufacturing of America" has literally no idea of how long it takes to set up a mfg factory (as opposed to an assembly site) or the supply chain to service it and how much Apple have invested in China to do so.
The answers are a)A long time and b)Lots (one estimate > the entire CHIPS act.
BTW the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 was designed to do exactly the same thing for US farmers
So it's not the Dumbass-in-Chief (and apparently his sole advisor in this Peter Navarro) doesn't have an example of exactly what was likely to happen. Any bo**cks about "He's playing 4/5/Nth dimensional chess" should start by showing wheather the FOCF can play the regular kind first. I know of no such example.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
