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'Why PC Builders Should Stock Up on Components Now' (pcmag.com)
Michael Kan, writing for PCMag: NZXT is a popular PC desktop case vendor, but the California-based company recently had to raise its prices. The reason? The new US tariffs on Chinese imports includes PC cases. In September, the Trump administration imposed the 10 percent duty, which also cover motherboards, graphics cards, and CPU coolers from the country. As a result, NZXT had to introduce a 10 percent price increase on PC cases to deal with the added costs, VP Jim Carlton told PCMag in an interview.
And building a PC could get even more expensive in 2019; US tariffs on Chinese-made goods will rise from 10 percent to 25 percent in January. "If I needed to build a system in the next six months, I'd definitely build it before the end of the year," Carlton told us. For PC builders, the tariffs risk adding a few hundred dollars to the total cost of components for a custom desktop. "If it's a $2,000 purchase on 25 percent tariffs, it's going to be a $2,500 purchase," Carlton said. "So we are very concerned with the direction of where this is going. I don't have a 10 percent [profit] margin I can just throw away and absorb the tariffs," he added. "And certainly no one has a margin for 25 percent."
And building a PC could get even more expensive in 2019; US tariffs on Chinese-made goods will rise from 10 percent to 25 percent in January. "If I needed to build a system in the next six months, I'd definitely build it before the end of the year," Carlton told us. For PC builders, the tariffs risk adding a few hundred dollars to the total cost of components for a custom desktop. "If it's a $2,000 purchase on 25 percent tariffs, it's going to be a $2,500 purchase," Carlton said. "So we are very concerned with the direction of where this is going. I don't have a 10 percent [profit] margin I can just throw away and absorb the tariffs," he added. "And certainly no one has a margin for 25 percent."
There is no law of god or men that says all electronics should come from China.
Order a quality motherboard from Japan. A GPU from Singapore. A CPU from Mexico. A PSU from Canada, and so on.
If you are human and care about human things, you should already be boycotting China.
People often dislike tariffs because it means more expensive goods. But they don't stop to think about why those good are inexpensive.
It all pretty boils down to the fact that, even when accounting for the cost of living, youcould not take a factory building anything in the third world andbring it to the use because of.
1. Labor laws...minimum wage, working hours, overtime rules.
2. Government regulations...safety, healthcare, discrimination, etc.
3. Environmental laws...emissions, hazardous waste disposal, etc,
Most would agree that all these regulations and laws are for the good and that we don't want a steel plant in the US operating like it does in China.
However, the same people who don't want to have the dirty, dangerous manufacturing here are more than happy to have it somewhere else and then take advantage of the cheap prices. Hence, their opposition to tariffs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's too bad that machined sheet metal is too difficult technically speaking for an American company to start producing. Whatever will we do?
Concern over hardware with a long supply chain like cpu's, mobo's, ram etc is one thing.. but something as stupidly simple to produce as a fucking metal box? come on.
Hopefully the outcome of these tariffs is that another country (maybe even the US?) will step up and start producing and supplying components. It is somewhat foolish to allow one single country to have a near total monopoly on something as important as electronics.
(But more than likely some enterprising individual will setup shop in Mexico or Canada; and import the goods from China, then just ship them across the border to avoid the tariff.)
in 2020. The one thing that's kept my meager standard of living up is cheap goods from China. It's not like tariffs will stop the flow of cheap labor from India flooding IT. Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think. A lot of people set their withholding lower than they should and are going to get an unpleasant surprise in April when they either have a smaller than average refund or maybe even owe.
Normally the decisions made by a president don't show up immediately. It took close to 8 years for Obama to repair the damage from the 2008 crash. But tariffs and tax cuts are immediate. If folks don't see a positive effect they're gonna get uppity. We'll know in a few years.
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Yeah, but with that logic, planted stories in the industry-friendly press won't lead to increased sales for Q4. Buy now before the tariffs increase your needlessly expensive case by $5! And other FUD statements!
Won't you think of the shareholders?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You seemingly don't realize that this is just a tax on American citizens... There is no "American-made" alternative to most of these components, so it will serve only to raise the prices Americans are forced to pay while the countries of production don't notice a difference.
Its hard to imagine a build where the DDR4 cost isnt dominating the equation... but you did it.
"His name was James Damore."
Concern over hardware with a long supply chain like cpu's, mobo's, ram etc is one thing.. but something as stupidly simple to produce as a fucking metal box? come on.
Sure, we know how to make cheap metal boxes in the US. That's never been a problem. The problem is the percentage of labor content that goes into producing cheap metal boxes and the cost of labor. Cheap metal boxes tend to be labor intensive to make unless you make those boxes in HUGE volumes. It's more economical to have them made in a country with cheap labor. China has cheap labor and the US does not. QED they get made in China and not the US.
Goods that are capital intensive are made in countries with high labor costs but access to cheap capital. The US has the cheapest cost of capital in the world so goods that have low labor content tend to be made here. Stuff like jumbo jets, earth moving equipment, cars, CPUs, chemicals, etc. The US has a manufacturing sector worth about $3 TRILLION annually which makes one of the 5 largest economies in the world - roughly the same size as the entire GDP of the UK or Germany. We make lots of stuff but we can't compete on cheap metal boxes just like China can't (currently) compete with the US on jumbo jets.
Any time you see an idiot politician (like Trump) promising to "bring back manufacturing jobs" to the US they are promising the impossible. The only way those "cheap metal boxes" will get produced here in the US is if we experience a massive reduction in wages to bring us close to those paid in China. No amount of tariffs will change that economic reality. I'm pretty sure you don't actually want such a fall in wages to happen. The good news is that as China becomes more prosperous their wages will rise and labor intensive production will leave China for other places with still cheaper labor. Already happens in some industries.
Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think.
It was plenty big for certain people with several commas in their annual income. That isn't the real problem though. The real problem is that they cut taxes without cutting either Medicare/Medicaid or the defense budget or social security which together account for around 3/4 of federal spending. So we continue to accrue debt at a rate of nearly a $trillion per year with no end in sight which our children are going to have to pay off sooner or later. In 2017 we basically borrowed the entire defense department budget. ALL of it.
So enjoy the party while it lasts. Sooner or later the bills will come due and your children will "thank" you for it.
Sounds like a business opportunity to make PC cases in the US so Americans aren't 'forced' to buy Chinese shit.
Apparently you missed the past decade where big businesses has been positioning to transition to using south american cheap labor instead of southeast asian cheap labor.
"His name was James Damore."
Not really.
The vast majority of sales on any product is supplying industry for other projects. The 10-25% increase in a component's price just becomes a small percentage of the final product price. All together, the final assembled product is more expensive to produce, but for no directly-attributable reason. It's not "the tariff on the case". It's "parts just cost more for this batch".
Now, that takes place over a span of years, as parts work their way through supply-chain warehouses. Computers are some of the fastest-moving products, but they can still take a couple of years to move inventory from manufacturer to consumer. It's a few months at the importer, a few months at the retailer, and a few months at the assembler, but it adds up. That delay further reduces the visibility of the tariff's impact. Parts just seem to have generally-higher prices, even if they appear to come from American sources.
By the time the product gets to the consumer market, it's still listed with the usual markup, and sells at a slightly-reduced rate, but since the tariffs affect all manufacturers with American supply chains, consumers can't get a better deal by going elsewhere. Even if another manufacturer were able to sell at lower prices, they now have an option to raise their prices to keep the market status quo (which is likely right what they're tooled for and ready to produce). In short, the US manufacturers' profits are cut, and foreign manufacturers' profits grow.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Sounds like a business opportunity to make PC cases in the US so Americans aren't 'forced' to buy Chinese shit.
Go ahead and try since you think it is so easy. We can talk about how it went after your bankruptcy.
Here's a little clue for you though. The reason we don't make PC cases in the US has NOTHING to do with our technical ability to make such cases and has everything to do with the cost of labor and to a lesser extent cost of materials. We know how to make them but we cannot do it as cheaply as they can in China. No amount of tariffs will change that fact nor will they cause the supply chains for goods made in China to shift to the US in any substantial way.
You seemingly don't realize that increased cost will reduce demand AND create a market advantage to production of these items in the US.
Speaking as someone who actually makes products like this for a living including electronics that go into metal boxes, you could not be more wrong. If it reduces demand, it doesn't matter if the box is made in the US or China. The China+tariffs vs US made at the same price will not benefit US consumers. It means we are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money to support a tiny little industry with a handful of jobs. Explain to me the logic of making literally every PC purchased more expensive in order to gain a few hundred jobs in a niche industry? Tariffs are almost never a good idea and this is no exception.
Raise the price of steel to support the roughly 80k steel workers in the US and you raise the price of every car made which hurts 2 million auto workers + everyone who buys a car. You are robbing the many to benefit a few.
Its sad when someone points out that getting lots of money through money laundering & fraud and cheating on your immigrant wives to get some extra sex is now the american dream.
Only because any tariff that might otherwise be sufficient to accomplish it would only result in a domestic black market being created to meet the demand.
Incorrect. The problems with tariffs is that they are a blunt instrument and they almost always have unintended consequences. You raise prices on steel and it raises prices on everything made with steel which is a far larger industry than just the steel industry. You protect a few jobs at the cost of far more. Take an economics 101 course and you'll learn how tariffs almost invariably result in a net loss to the economy of both countries individually and collectively. They almost never actually accomplish the intended goal without substantial collateral damage to the broader economy.
>Sounds like a business opportunity to make PC cases in the US so Americans aren't 'forced' to buy Chinese shit.
A business opportunity for higher cost domestic products - maybe. The tariffs are a poorly disguised inflationary consumption tax needed to make up for the tax cuts to the corporations and wealthy.
Greed is the root of all evil.
No, it's because China as the supply chains. A US designed GPU has to be combined with a large number of other parts to be useful, and they are all made in vast quantities in China. So either you ship them all to the US individually for assembly, or you make the GPU and assemble the card over there and ship the finished product.
Conditions in Chinese factories are actually pretty good for the most part. Demand from western manufacturers, a desire to be seen as high quality to get business from the west and the necessity of things like a clean environment and consistent quality to produce highly complex goods has improved things greatly. Of course there are still some bad ones, particularly for textiles, but the idea that it's "slave labour" that is driving China's competitiveness is a myth.
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I know the case isn't $2000, but people blinging out on their case are not exactly price sensitive. It's not a dig - I have a nice case because I like the look, noise suppression, vibration reduction, and the serviceability. But let's be honest, it's a frivolous expense - my old stamped sheet metal case with the sharp edges was perfectly serviceable.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Cases from the 90s WTF, that shit doesn't have a USB 3.0 port on the front.
A Case from the 90s may have spare drive bays, a quick search for front panel USB hub yields results that can mount directly into a 3.5 or 5.25 inch drive bay.
Free-range?
it's not much of a problem because when China comes to collect their money they'll ask "Well what did you spend it all on?" and we'll just answer "Well, all these bombs".
Seriously though, gov't debt doesn't really function like household debt. Most of it (2/3rds) we "owe" to ourselves. This is the one and only thing Trump got right. Deficits don't really matter all that much. They're a boogieman of the right. Google "starve the beast" sometime. It's a trick to get you to accept education and healthcare cuts while they raid the public coffers for their cronies.
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