[DSMan195276]

The catch is that it costs them more to acquire the laptops so (in theory) they can't acquire as many of them to sell if they start from the same amount of money. Which is ok on the surface, but makes them a worse investment because they return less money back to you for the same amount put in.

Ex. If they only have $1M to spend, the tariffs mean they can only buy ~1800 laptops to sell instead of 2000, so if the profit of $500 stayed the same then the company is making less money than it did before. If they instead bump the margin for each laptop to $550 then they make the same amount of money as before even though they're selling less laptops.

Of course in an actual version it's messier because the math doesn't work out that cleanly. If it costs $800 to make a laptop you sell for $1000 then it now costs 880 with a 10% tariff. To keep the 20% margin the new price would be $1056, only a 5% increase in the final price.