“President Donald Trump says his proposed aluminum and steel tariffs are about putting America first, but they may affect all kinds of products people in the U.S. consume or use daily — from Bud Light to Hershey’s Kisses to Mac computers,” Jennifer Kaplan and Mark Gurman report for Bloomberg.
“Trump said Thursday the U.S. will impose tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum for ‘a long period of time,'” Kaplan and Gurman report. “The details of Trump’s plan aren’t yet clear, and how the tariffs are implemented will determine just how widely they affect American products.”
“Take Apple Inc., which has many of its gadgets assembled in China, including phones with aluminum or steel edges. If the levies only apply to raw materials, the effect on Apple would be minuscule, since the company produces only a small portion of its Macs in the U.S., according to Gene Munster of Loup Ventures,” Kaplan and Gurman report. “If the tariff includes finished goods, Apple’s Mac and iPhone costs could go up by as much as 0.2 percent, assuming the tax is a percentage of the metal components of Macs and iPhones, Munster said. ‘I don’t see much of an increase in costs,’ said Jun Zhang, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities who follows Apple and other electronics companies.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 0.2% is $2 per $1,000. A $5,000 entry-level iMac Pro would cost $10 more.