I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.

Are phones an exception? I've heard Brazil is a very mobile-first market.

Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).