Framework stops selling some laptops in the US in response to tariffs
25 comments
·April 9, 2025null
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jongjong
[flagged]
packetlost
> The tariffs will create more jobs in the US (and in other economies due to retaliatory tariffs there) and so there will be more people in the market who will be able to afford to pay 10% more.
This isn't backed by evidence, it's at best speculation for some potential future at least 4 years, but probably closer to 10, in the future. Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.
beloch
Also, if most countries continue to trade freely with each other but there are import/export taxes on just the U.S., the U.S. becomes an unattractive place for any products with international supply chains or that are amortized across an international market, both in terms of manufacture and sales.
There was a good post here the other day on bicycle manufacturing that pointed out that, while cheap, high volume, low-end products may indeed be practical to manufacture in the U.S. primarily for the U.S. market, it may not make sense to manufacture many high-end products behind trade barriers. Such products have low margins and need free access to the world market to make sense to build. Those that are currently manufactured outside the U.S. will likely stay outside the U.S. while those made in the U.S. may have to consider moving. Some will likely just no longer make sense to import into the U.S., leaving a void in that market, and some won't make sense to build at all.
Breaking the world market up into regions, as the U.S. is currently attempting, reduces the world's ability to make specialized, low-volume products.
rayiner
> This isn't backed by evidence, it's at best speculation for some potential future at least 4 years, but probably closer to 10, in the future. Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.
There are two arguments in favor of free trade:
1) We don’t want to spend expensive american labor building X.
2) We don’t have the industrial capability to build X anymore.
The latter seems to be a damning indictment of the former. It’s one thing not to build X domestically to save money. It’s another thing to lose the capability to feasibly build X in the US because you have outsources that capability and lost it.
I’m sure if we ever got into a war with China, they’d wait for us for a decade to rebuild our manufacturing capacity.
packetlost
#2 is basically the whole justification for the military industrial complex. Why do you think so many tax dollars go to the big ominous "military spending" bucket? It's not going into some black whole, it props up hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and R&D jobs. Even then, it doesn't justify blanket tariffs on entire countries, it would justify tariffs on specific industries that are seen as strategic, which is not what's happening.
eagleislandsong
> a decade
You're quite optimistic. With the current administration and its purge of federal workers (including those in NIST), it will likely take much longer than that.
thaumasiotes
> There are two arguments in favor of free trade
You missed the single most common argument in favor of free trade:
1. Everyone has more stuff than otherwise.
Under free trade, total world production is higher.
tomlockwood
> Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.
Particularly given how wild this administration is. Who knows what the situation will be tomorrow, even! America is increasingly perceived as a wildly unreliable partner.
Phlebsy
> This seems political.
Say it ain't so - tariffs are now being used for political reasons instead of economic? I hope the administration gets word of this.
With how unstable the situation is and Framework being a small outfit shipping out of their processing & QA center(every unit is hand assembled and tested before shipping), it makes far more sense to just pause it all than risk tariffs being raised to 104% arbitrarily before they can process an order.
roxolotl
It’s a temporary pause presumably so they can figure pricing out. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to take some time to determine what the new price should be. Maybe they get a good deal on shipping and came only raise prices by 5% or it’s worse and they need to raise by 15%. Who knows right now there’s a lot in flux.
tokioyoyo
I’m not sure if you’ve been a part of any company that are depended on supply chains, but the problem is, planning is hard-to-impossible right now. My friend explained to me how he just doesn’t know how to price products he’s importing. Between the time he orders the products, and the product reaches the port of the export country, he needs to know how much duties he has to pay at the port. He just doesn’t know that, so he can bake it into the price of the product.
dragonwriter
> The tariffs will (in the medium and long term) create more jobs in the US
No, they won't. The tariffs and the responses to them, if maintained, will replace existing jobs with different, lower-value ones, working a durable contraction of the production possibilities curve vs. what it would have been without them.
sct202
Framework is a tiny company in the grand scheme of things, they aren't going to be able to fund their own US operations. Larger computing companies might be able to but smaller companies are dependent on existing supply chains of subcontractors and contract manufacturers that don't exist in the US.
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refulgentis
It's boring ol' ECO101: price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes down.
A company selling premium laptops at $1,200 can absorb the deadweight loss.
The budget seller can't.
That is why it is the low end ones they're cutting.
* it's worth tossing around what TDS looks like, both to the outgroup, and the ingroup
DadBase
They could sidestep this entirely by shipping the boards separately and letting users assemble them. Worked fine for RS-232 terminals.
hackernoops
Tariffs are good. If you have a nice mall, and you allow street vendors to walk through it selling junk, eventually the mall becomes trashy and there's no benefit to paying the rent for a proper storefront.
yellowapple
Tariffs don't do anything to prevent street vendors from selling junk; there is plenty of domestically-made junk to be sold. They only serve to hinder outside vendors from competing against that junk with either cheaper junk or better not-junk (Framework in this case being the latter).
martinky24
There are plenty of semi-legitimate arguments, this is not one of them.
Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43617207