I hear all this “we could do” bullshit but it’s never “this is what we did”. The fact is, cheap IoT electronics are made in china now. They aren’t made in India or anywhere else. Microcontrollers that used to cost $5 now cost over $20. It’s so obvious when the raspberry pi foundation had a microcontroller ready to release as soon as the tariff was in place. Its a garbage, over engineered shitshow that wouldn’t be competitive without the tariff.

The ones that suffer with this are people trying to learn electronics and programming and the barrier to entry just got a lot higher. In addition all the people running amazon businesses and making money importing this stuff have been priced out of the market by the big name distributors. I’m not saying china is great, i fucking hate china. The best thing from there was cheap electronics boards that kids could learn with. Now those same boards cost 4x as much to make american versions of the same exact thing competitive. That’s not making jobs. It’s enriching a few large corporations that have access to the tech needed to produce these items already. We aren’t making better and new things, this is going after people that want to copycat china in the US and as usual the poor people pay the biggest price. I could give a shit about a tiny price hike, but for a kid with no money that just wants to learn, they have to pay the most. This will eventually hit consumer electronics which is going to drive the prices of tvs and everything else higher so everyone will pay eventually.