Acer is the first to raise laptop prices because of Trump

Acer CEO and chairman Jason Chen says your laptop will cost an extra 10 percent in the United States next month — and that his rivals might attempt price gouging if they think you’ll pay even more.

“We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward,” he told The Telegraph, referring to President Trump’s 10 percent tariff on incoming goods from China. While big tech companies have generally been quiet on how they’ll respond to Trump tariffs, Acer says it just made the decision to increase prices last week, and it’ll take effect a few weeks from now.

It sounds like the price hike may not affect desktops, as Chen told The Telegraph that Acer had moved its desktop computer manufacturing outside China during Trump’s earlier tariffs during his first term. He said Acer might now consider moving some of its laptop manufacturing outside China too, with US manufacturing as “one of the options.”

But as of today, the vast majority of the world’s laptops are assembled in China — even US-based companies like Apple, Dell, or HP all look to contract manufacturers there.

The Telegraph doesn’t have a quote from Chen about possible price gouging, but rather puts it like this:

He said that some companies were likely to use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices by more than 10pc.

We’ve reached out to other PC makers to see if they’ll follow suit. Apple, Dell, HP, and Lenovo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and didn’t comment for our earlier story; Asus and Razer are getting back to us.

Framework tells The Verge that its modular laptops themselves probably won’t be affected, but some of the modules themselves might. “Because we manufacture Framework Laptops and Mainboards in Taiwan, we have limited impact from the additional recently introduced tariffs. Some of our modules are manufactured in China, so we are taking this into account for future module pricing for US customers in the Framework Marketplace as we also continue to diversify our supply base,” says CEO Nirav Patel.