Unless you’re a real stickler for the finer points of the consumer tech industry, you might not know the history of the Vaio laptop series. But to miss the chaos unfolding from the Trump administration’s massive tariffs, you’d have to be living under a rock, under a penguin, on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean. The current owner of Vaio is leveraging this chaos to sell a few “tariff free” laptops.
To address the first point: Yes, Vaio (stylized VAIO) laptops are still a thing, originally launched by Sony back in 1996 but spun off into an independent Japanese manufacturer when Sony exited the laptop business about a decade ago. It’s currently majority-owned by Japanese retailer Nojima. At the moment, Vaio offers three different series—the SX, SX-R, and FS—in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes. The designs are unremarkable and don’t often get spotted even on big retailers, but it looks like they’re getting some love from Costco as a US sales partner.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the Vaio brand sent out emails to some customers hoping to lure them in with “Tariff Free Inventory.” While it doesn’t go into specifics, this is undoubtedly a reference to US president Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs on nearly every country that supplies finished goods and raw materials to the United States. This sent stock prices and other economic indicators into a tailspin, in what’s already being referred to as “the 2025 stock market crash.”
For the Japanese Vaio brand, which manufactures all its current models in a Nagano factory, the relevant tariff is the 24 percent tax on products from Japan, according to Reuters. Depending on how the tariffs are implemented on specific components, the 34 percent tax on goods from China and 32 percent tax on goods from Taiwan may also come into play for laptops sold in the US.
In the best-case scenario, Vaio’s cheapest laptop at the moment will jump from $1,100 to $1,364, assuming Vaio passes the cost directly onto retailers and final buyers. For the SX-R mentioned in the “tariff free” email, the starting price would jump from $2,200 to $2,728 for the same model. For more estimations on how tariffs will affect consumer electronics prices, check out this breakdown. The prices on the Vaio website as of April 7th don’t seem to have changed much since January, as seen on the Internet Archive.
It seems like a safe assumption that Vaio is promoting prices for current inventory held within the United States, which can be sold at today’s prices without fear of tariffs affecting profitability. It’ll be a few weeks before the latest round of tariffs imposed on goods being imported to the United States start impacting finished items being sold to consumers.
If you’re in the market for a new laptop in the US, you might want to look for one right away. As Vaio demonstrates, there’s only a limited amount of computers in current supply line that can be sold at pre-Trump prices.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.