from Hacker News

Tariffs Killed Arduboy

by Bondi_Blue on 5/7/25, 5:27 PM with 24 comments

• by bicx on 5/7/25, 5:38 PM

  My first reaction is that this just pushes up the price point for an entire segment of the industry for U.S. customers, but it doesn't seem like it would outright _kill_ companies like this.

  But then I thought a bit deeper.

  Any small company that relies on profits from the last batch to fund the next batch will certainly just be killed or need to acquire debt to fund purchasing of parts/stock under new tariffs. That really sucks for small manufacturers.

• by palmotea on 5/7/25, 7:26 PM

  The tariffs really should've been phased in slowly to give supply chains time to adjust.

  But one thing we learned from COVID is the market is dumb and over-optimizes for a small number of factors, so there won't be any significant adjustment in supply chains or redistribution of capability without drastic government corrective action.

• by tacker2000 on 5/7/25, 6:13 PM

  Unfortunately this won’t be the last casualty. We are looking at a Covid-style disruption of the economy here. This will not end well for anybody…

• by Workaccount2 on 5/7/25, 6:11 PM

  It sucks because electronics manufacturing the US both sucks and is wildly expensive. The people who are actually manning these places matters a lot, and it's mostly unskilled low wage workers who are there just to work. They might have come from a job pallet stacking and leave to stock grocery shelves a few months later. There isn't much specialty because there isn't much industry to build it up in.

  You end up with a high cost per unit, and a bad yield at that. And trust me, when one capacitor value is misplaced causing intermittent failure, because a worker had to tape additional parts on a reel and didn't know that "look the same != is the same", you can easily sink in 40-50 hours trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the 5 units that are failing ask me how I know I have many many examples lol

• by jmclnx on 5/7/25, 5:36 PM

  What is Arduboy ? I went to the site and seemed they sell Games. Is that correct ?

• by tmsh on 5/7/25, 5:46 PM

  Why not call it Ardukid (if it's resurrected)? I.e., evolve from Gameboy and not bring in gender from the very beginning where it's irrelevant (for the next generation). Imagine if you're a young girl interested in tech. It's those little paper cuts that lead to a world with gender imbalances for no very good reason.