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sumanthvepa 15 days ago

The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error in the cost of making Microsoft Office. The biggest two costs are labor and nowadays, compute for AI.

nine_zeros 15 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes my example was smallish. Laptop itself doesn't matter as much as the general cost of doing anything in America due to tariffs. And yes, that includes higher health insurance costs, higher server costs due to cloud providers raising prices, and higher cost of literally holding office space.

All of these would be cheaper in any other country. The choices are endless.

strale 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

However compute power will get significantly more expensive due to tariffs on components. So your argument is somewhat contradictory.

sumanthvepa 14 days ago | parent [-]

True. I'm not so sure about this. But the pure imported hardware cost is probably just a few 10s of millions, maybe 100 million or so. For office alone.

It's the cost of setting up and running the data centre that costs money. This is once again has a significant labor component.

aaron695 15 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error

In general it's not treated that way. Getting a $10 cable at work even though your salary is $80,000 can be hard

One of the biggest costs is bureaucracy.

Given other countries will have reciprocal tariffs and/or higher taxes I'm not sure why they will be cheaper it's a complex change going on.