Technologies
Tariffs Explained: Everything You Need to Know as Trump Doubles Another Tariff
While Donald Trump’s wide-ranging taxes on imports face scrutiny in court, rates on steel and aluminum have been doubled. Here’s what it’ll all mean for you.
President Donald Trump’s second-term economic plan can be summed up in one word: tariffs. When his barrage of import taxes went into overdrive a month ago, markets trembled and business leaders sounded alarms about the economic damage they would cause. After weeks of uncertainty and clashes with major companies, Trump’s tariffs hit their biggest roadblock yet in court before being reinstated ahead of a final ruling, allowing him to double the rate on imported steel and aluminum this week.
Late Wednesday, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump had overstepped his authority when he imposed tariffs, effectively nullifying the tariffs, after concluding that Congress has the sole authority to issue tariffs and decide other foreign trade matters, and that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 — which Trump has used to justify his ability to impose them — doesn’t grant the president «unlimited» authority on tariffs. The next day, an appeals court allowed the tariffs to go back into effect for the time being, while the administration calls for the Supreme Court to overturn the trade court ruling altogether.
However things shake out in the end, the initial ruling certainly came as a relief to many, given the chaos and uncertainty that Trump’s tariffs how caused thus far. For his part, Trump has recently lashed out against companies — like Apple and Walmart — that have reacted to the tariffs or discussed their impacts in ways he dislikes. Apple has been working to move manufacturing for the US market from China to relatively less-tariffed India, to which Trump has threatened them with a 25% penalty rate if they don’t bring manufacturing to the US instead. Experts have predicted that a US-made iPhone, for example, would cost consumers about $3,500. During a recent earnings call, Walmart warned that prices would rise on things like toys, tech and food at some point in the summer, which prompted Trump to demand the chain eat the costs themselves, another unlikely scenario.
Amid all this noise, you might still be wondering: What exactly are tariffs and what will they mean for me?
The short answer: Expect to pay more for at least some goods and services. For the long answer, keep reading, and for more, check out CNET’s price tracker for 11 popular and tariff-vulnerable products.
What are tariffs?
Put simply, a tariff is a tax on the cost of importing or exporting goods by a particular country. So, for example, a «60% tariff» on Chinese imports would be a 60% tax on the price of importing, say, computer components from China.
Trump has been fixated on imports as the centerpiece of his economic plans, often claiming that the money collected from taxes on imported goods would help finance other parts of his agenda. The US imports $3 trillion of goods from other countries annually.
The president has also, more recently, shown a particular fixation on trade deficits, claiming that the US having a trade deficit with any country means that country is ripping the US off. This is a flawed understanding of the matter, as a lot of economists have said, deficits are often a simple case of resource realities: Wealthy nations like the US buy specific things from nations that have them, while those nations might in turn not be wealthy enough to buy much of anything from the US.
While Trump deployed tariffs in his first term, notably against China, he ramped up his plans more significantly for the 2024 campaign, promising 60% tariffs against China and a universal 20% tariff on all imports into the US. Now, tariffs against China are more than double that amount and a universal tariff on all exports is a reality.
«Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,» Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan last year. At one point, he called himself «Tariff Man» in a post on Truth Social.
Who pays the cost of tariffs?
Trump repeatedly claimed, before and immediately after returning to the White House, that the country of origin for an imported good pays the cost of the tariffs and that Americans would not see any price increases from them. However, as economists and fact-checkers stressed, this is not the case.
The companies importing the tariffed goods — American companies or organizations in this case — pay the higher costs. To compensate, companies can raise their prices or absorb the additional costs themselves.
So, who ends up paying the price for tariffs? In the end, usually you, the consumer. For instance, a universal tariff on goods from Canada would increase Canadian lumber prices, which would have the knock-on effect of making construction and home renovations more expensive for US consumers. While it is possible for a company to absorb the costs of tariffs without increasing prices, this is not at all likely, at least for now.
Speaking with CNET, Ryan Reith, vice president of International Data’s worldwide mobile device tracking programs, explained that price hikes from tariffs, especially on technology and hardware, are inevitable in the short term. He estimated that the full amount imposed on imports by Trump’s tariffs would be passed on to consumers, which he called the «cost pass-through.» Any potential efforts for companies to absorb the new costs themselves would come in the future, once they have a better understanding of the tariffs, if at all.
Which Trump tariffs have gone into effect?
Following Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements on April 2, the following tariffs are in effect:
- A 50% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, doubled from 25% as of June 4.
- A 30% tariff on all Chinese imports until Aug. 10 while negotiations continue. China being a major focus of Trump’s trade agenda, this rate has been notably higher than others and has steadily increased as Beijing returned fire with tariffs of its own, peaking at 145%, which it could return to down the line if a deal is not reached.
- 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico not covered under the 2018 USMCA trade agreement brokered during Trump’s first term. The deal covers roughly half of all imports from Canada and about a third of those from Mexico, so the rest are subject to the new tariffs. Energy imports not covered by USMCA only will be taxed at 10%.
- A 25% tariff on all foreign-made cars and auto parts.
- A sweeping overall 10% tariff on all imported goods.
For certain countries that Trump said were more responsible for the US trade deficit, Trump imposed what he called «reciprocal» tariffs that exceed the 10% level: 20% for the 27 nations that make up the European Union, 26% for India, 24% for Japan and so on. These were meant to take effect on April 9 but were delayed by 90 days as a result of historic stock market volatility, which makes the new effective date July 8.
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025
Trump’s claim that these reciprocal tariffs are based on high tariffs imposed against the US by the targeted countries has drawn intense pushback from experts and economists, who have argued that some of these numbers are false or potentially inflated. For example, the above chart claims a 39% tariff from the EU, despite its average tariff for US goods being around 3%. Some of the tariffs are against places that are not countries but tiny territories of other nations. The Heard and McDonald Islands, for example, are uninhabited. We’ll dig into the confusion around these calculations below.
Notably, that minimum 10% tariff will not be on top of those steel, aluminum and auto tariffs. Canada and Mexico were also spared from the 10% minimum additional tariff imposed on all countries the US trades with.
On April 11, the administration said smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics, along with flat panel displays, memory chips and semiconductors, were exempt from reciprocal tariffs. But it wasn’t clear whether that would remain the case or whether such products might face different fees later.
How were the Trump reciprocal tariffs calculated?
The numbers released by the Trump administration for its barrage of «reciprocal» tariffs led to widespread confusion among experts. Trump’s own claim that these new rates were derived by halving the tariffs already imposed against the US by certain countries was widely disputed, with critics noting that some of the numbers listed for certain countries were much higher than the actual rates and some countries had tariff rates listed despite not specifically having tariffs against the US at all.
In a post to X that spread fast across social media, finance journalist James Surowiecki said that the new reciprocal rates appeared to have been reached by taking the trade deficit the US has with each country and dividing it by the amount the country exports to the US. This, he explained, consistently produced the reciprocal tariff percentages revealed by the White House across the board.
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.
So we… https://t.co/PBjF8xmcuv— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 2, 2025
«What extraordinary nonsense this is,» Surowiecki wrote about the finding.
The White House later attempted to debunk this idea, releasing what it claimed was the real formula, though it was quickly determined that this formula was arguably just a more complex version of the one Surowiecki deduced.
What will the Trump tariffs do to prices?
In short: Prices are almost certainly going up, if not now, then eventually. That is, if the products even make it to US shelves at all, as some tariffs will simply be too high for companies to bother dealing with.
While the effects of a lot of tariffs might not be felt straight away, some potential real-world examples have already emerged. Microsoft has increased prices across the board for its Xbox gaming brand, with its flagship Xbox Series X console jumping 20% from $500 to $600. Elsewhere, Kent International, one of the main suppliers of bicycles to Walmart, announced that it would be stopping imports from China, which account for 90% of its stock.
Speaking about Trump’s tariff plans just before they were announced, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said that they would generate $6 trillion in revenue over the next decade. Given that tariffs are most often paid by consumers, CNN characterized this as potentially «the largest tax hike in US history.» New estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, cited by Axios, predict that Trump’s new tariffs will cause a 2.3% increase in inflation throughout 2025. This translates to about a $3,800 increase in expenses for the average American household.
Reith, the IDC analyst, told CNET that Chinese-based tech companies, like PC makers Acer, Asus and Lenovo, have «100% exposure» to these import taxes as they currently stand, with products like phones and computers the most likely to take a hit. He also said that the companies best positioned to weather the tariff impacts are those that have moved some of their operations out of China to places like India, Thailand and Vietnam, singling out the likes of Apple, Dell and HP. Samsung, based in South Korea, is also likely to avoid the full force of Trump’s tariffs.
In an effort to minimize its tariff vulnerability, Apple has begun to move the production of goods for the US market from China to India.
Will tariffs impact prices immediately?
In the short term — the first days or weeks after a tariff takes effect — maybe not. There are still a lot of products in the US imported pre-tariffs and on store shelves, meaning the businesses don’t need a price hike to recoup import taxes. Once new products need to be brought in from overseas, that’s when you’ll see prices start to climb because of tariffs or you’ll see them become unavailable.
That uncertainty has made consumers anxious. CNET’s survey revealed that about 38% of shoppers feel pressured to make certain purchases before tariffs make them more expensive. About 10% say they have already made certain purchases in hopes of getting them in before the price hikes, while 27% said they have delayed purchases for products that cost more than $500. Generally, this worry is the most acute concerning smartphones, laptops and home appliances.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and Trump critic, voiced concerns about when to buy certain things in a post on Bluesky just after Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements. In it, he suggested that consumers might want to stock up on certain items before tariff inflation hits.
«It’s not a bad idea to go to the local Walmart or big box retailer and buy lots of consumables now,» Cuban wrote. «From toothpaste to soap, anything you can find storage space for, buy before they have to replenish inventory. Even if it’s made in the USA, they will jack up the price and blame it on tariffs.»
CNET’s Money team recommends that before you make any purchase, especially of a high-ticket item, be sure that the expenditure fits within your budget and your spending plans in the first place. Buying something you can’t afford now because it might be less affordable later can be burdensome, to say the least.
What is the goal of the White House tariff plan?
The typical goal behind tariffs is to discourage consumers and businesses from buying the tariffed, foreign-sourced goods and encourage them to buy domestically produced goods instead. When implemented in the right way, tariffs are generally seen as a useful way to protect domestic industries.
One of the stated intentions for Trump’s tariffs is along those lines: to restore American manufacturing and production. However, the White House also claims to be having negotiations with numerous countries looking for tariffs exemptions and some officials have also floated the idea that the tariffs will help finance Trump’s tax cuts.
You don’t have to think about those goals for too long before you realize that they’re contradictory: If manufacturing moves to the US or if a bunch of countries are exempt from tariffs then tariffs aren’t actually being collected and can’t be used to finance anything. This and many other points have led a lot of economists to allege that Trump’s plans are misguided.
In terms of returning — or «reshoring» — manufacturing in the US, tariffs are a better tool for protecting industries that already exist because importers can fall back on them right away. Building up the factories and plants needed for this in the US could take years, leaving Americans to suffer under higher prices in the interim.
That problem is worsened by the fact that the materials needed to build those factories will also be tariffed, making the costs of «reshoring» production in the US too heavy for companies to stomach. These issues, and the general instability of American economic policies under Trump, are part of why experts warn that Trump’s tariffs could have the opposite effect: keeping manufacturing out of the US and leaving consumers stuck with inflated prices. Any factories that do get built in the US because of tariffs also have a high chance of being automated, canceling out a lot of job creation potential. To give you one real-world example of this: When warning customers of future price hikes, toy maker Mattel also noted that it had no plans to move manufacturing to the US.
Trump has reportedly been fixated on the notion that Apple’s iPhone — the most popular smartphone in the US market — can be manufactured entirely in the US. This has been broadly dismissed by experts, for a lot of the same reasons mentioned above, but also because an American-made iPhone could cost upward of $3,500. One report from 404 Media dubbed the idea «a pure fantasy.» The overall sophistication and breadth of China’s manufacturing sector has also been cited, with CEO Tim Cook stating in 2017 that the US lacks the number of tooling engineers to make its products.
For more, see how tariffs might raise the prices of Apple products and find some expert tips for saving money.
Technologies
He Got Us Talking to Alexa. Now He Wants to Kill Off AI Hallucinations
British tech pioneer William Tunstall-Pedoe wants to solve the biggest problem in artificial intelligence.

If it weren’t for Amazon, it’s entirely possible that instead of calling out to Alexa to change the music on our speakers, we might have been calling out to Evi instead. That’s because the tech we know today as Amazon’s smart assistant started out life with the name of Evi (pronounced ee-vee), as named by its original developer, William Tunstall-Pedoe.
The British entrepreneur and computer scientist was experimenting with artificial intelligence before most of us had even heard of it. Inspired by sci-fi, he «arrogantly» set out to create a way for humans to talk to computers way back in 2008, he said at SXSW London this week.
Arrogant or not, Tunstall-Pedoe’s efforts were so successful that Evi, which launched in 2012 around the same time as Apple’s Siri, was acquired by Amazon and he joined a team working on a top-secret voice assistant project. What resulted from that project was the tech we all know today as Alexa.
That original mission accomplished, Tunstall-Pedoe now has a new challenge in his sights: to kill off AI hallucinations, which he says makes the technology highly risky for all of us to use. Hallucinations are the inaccurate pieces of information and content that AI generates out of thin air. They are, said Tunstall-Pedoe, «an intrinsic problem» of the technology.
Through the experience he had with Alexa, he learned that people personify the technology and assume that when it’s speaking back to them it’s thinking the way we think. «What it’s doing is truly remarkable, but it’s doing something different from thinking,» said Tunstall-Pedoe. «That sets expectations… that what it’s telling you is true.»
Innumerable examples of AI generating nonsense show us that truth and accuracy are never guaranteed. Tunstall-Pedoe was concerned that the industry isn’t doing enough to tackle hallucinations, so formed his own company, Unlikely AI, to tackle what he views as a high-stakes problem.
Anytime we speak to an AI, there’s a chance that what it’s telling us is false, he said. «You can take that away into your life, take decisions on it, or you put it on the internet and it gets spread by others, [or] used to train future AIs to make the world a worse place.»
Some AI hallucinations have little impact, but in industries where the cost of getting things wrong — in medicine, law, finance and insurance, for example — inaccurately generated content can have severe consequences. These are the industries that Unlikely AI is targeting for now, said Tunstall-Pedoe
Unlikely AI uses a mix of deep tech and proprietary tech to ground outputs in logic, minimizing the risk of hallucinations, as well as to log the decision-making process of algorithms. This makes it possible for companies to understand where things have gone wrong, when they inevitably do.
Right now, AI can never be 100% accurate due to the underlying tech, said Tunstall-Pedoe. But advances currently happening in his own company and others like it mean that we’re moving towards a point where accuracy can be achieved.
For now, Unlikely AI is mainly being used by business customers, but eventually Tunstall-Pedoe believes it will be built into services and software all of us use. The change being brought about by AI, like any change, presents us with risks, he said. But overall he remains «biased towards optimism» that AI will be a net positive for society.
Technologies
Summer Game Fest 2025 Kicks Off Today. How to Watch the Biggest Gaming Trailers of the Year
There’s a whole wide weekend of video gaming happening at the Summer Game Fest. Get the full scoop on how and when to watch.

What started as a pandemic-related substitute for the long-running E3 trade show has turned into the one of the biggest video games event of the year. Fans and journalists will get early looks at the most anticipated AAA and indie video games, and we’ll all get tons of new trailers.
Heavy hitters like Sega, Bandai Namco, Capcom and Square Enix will be showing off their latest and greatest creations, while Xbox is hosting its own full showcase on Sunday, June 8, and Playstation will present the premiere of Death Stranding 2 on Sunday night.
The show kicks off at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, June 6, live from the YouTube Theater in Hollywood Park in Inglewood, California. Fortunately, you can catch all the nonstop gaming action right from your couch. Here’s how to watch Summer Game Fest 2025 live.
How to watch Summer Game Fest 2025 live
Summer Game Fest will be multicast on numerous streaming channels, but the official livestream will be shown on YouTube by the Game Awards. The channel will continue to show the trailer for Summer Games Fest 2025 until the live event begins at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT) Friday.
Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule
The official Summer Game Fest show kicks off at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT) on Friday, June 6, with 2 hours of Summer Game Fest Live, which should be chock-full of huge announcements from leading video game developers.
Immediately following the live kickoff event, the independent organization Day of the Devs hosts a showcase dedicated to indie games.
The weekend’s other big highlights include a Wholesome Direct showcase on Saturday at noon ET, focusing on the biggest releases, trailers and announcements for «cozy games,» and the premiere of Death Stranding 2 on Sunday night, which will feature an appearance from legendary game designer Hideo Kojima.
Here’s the full schedule of broadcasts for Summer Game Fest 2025. All times shown are ET. For PT subtract 3 hours.
Friday, June 6
- Summer Game Fest Live, 5 p.m.
- Day of the Devs, 7 p.m.
- Devolver Direct: Ball x Pit: The Kenny Sun Story, 8 p.m.
Saturday, June 7
- Wholesome Direct, noon
- Women-led games showcase, 1 p.m.
- Latin-American games showcase, 2 p.m.
- Southeast Asian games showcase, 3 p.m.
- Green games showcase, 4 p.m.
- Frosty Games Fest, 7 p.m.
Sunday, June 8
- Xbox games showcase, 1 p.m.
- PC gaming show, 3 p.m.
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach premiere, 10 p.m.
Monday, June 9
- Black voices in gaming, noon
Technologies
Apple’s Siri Could Be More Like ChatGPT. But Is That What You Want?
Commentary: Should Siri evolve to become more of a manager than an assistant? Let’s hope Apple can listen to what people want from its voice assistant.
I’ve noticed a vibe shift in the appetite for AI on our devices. My social feeds are flooded with disgust over what’s being created by Google’s AI video generator tool, Veo 3. The unsettling realistic video of fake people and voices it creates makes it clear we will have a hard time telling apart fiction from reality. In other words, the AI slop is looking less sloppy.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Anthropic is warning people that AI will wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. In an interview with Axios, Dario Amodei is suggesting government needs to step in to protect us from a mass elimination of jobs that can happen very rapidly.
So as we gear up for Apple’s big WWDC presentation on Monday, I have a different view of headlines highlighting Apple being behind in the AI race. I wonder, what exactly is the flavor of AI that people want or need right now? And will it really matter if Apple keeps waiting longer to push out it’s long promised (and long delayed) personalized Siri when people are not feeling optimistic about AI’s impact on our society?
In this week’s episode of One More Thing, which you can watch embedded above, I go over some of the recent reporting from Bloomberg that discusses leadership changes on the Siri team, and how there are different views in what consumers want out of Siri. Should Apple approach AI in a way to make Siri into a home-grown chatbot, or just make it a better interface for controlling devices? (Maybe a bit of both.)
I expect a lot of griping after WWDC about the state of Siri and Apple’s AI, with comparisons to other products like ChatGPT. But I hope we can use those gripes to voice what we really want in the next path for the assistant, by sharing our thoughts and speaking with our wallet. Do you want a Siri that’s better at understanding context, or one that goes further and makes decisions for you? It’s a question I’ll be dwelling on more as Apple gives us the next peak into the future of iOS on Monday, and perhaps a glimpse of how the next Siri is shaping up.
If you’re looking for more One More Thing, subscribe to our YouTube page to catch Bridget Carey breaking down the latest Apple news and issues every Friday.
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