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At Trial, Mark Zuckerberg Avoids Explaining Takeovers of Instagram and WhatsApp

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At Trial, Mark Zuckerberg Avoids Explaining Takeovers of Instagram and WhatsApp


In his second day on the stand of a landmark antitrust trial, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he bought Instagram and WhatsApp because it was hard to build new apps and dodged questions about whether he was trying to snuff out competitive threats to his company.

“Building a new app is hard,” he said Tuesday when asked why, in one 2012 email that was presented, he had seemed intent on buying Instagram. “We’ve probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company, and the majority of them don’t go anywhere.”

“We could have built an app,” he added. “Whether it succeeded or not is a matter of speculation.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony is central to the antitrust trial, being held in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The chief executive spent several hours on Monday answering questions from lawyers as they tried to make the case that Mr. Zuckerberg saw the other apps as rivals that he needed to take out. During the questioning, which at times became contentious, Mr. Zuckerberg frequently said he didn’t remember his thought process for certain emails.

The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, poses a consequential threat to Mr. Zuckerberg’s business, which he co-founded as Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. The F.T.C. is asking Judge James E. Boasberg, who is presiding over the case, to find the company guilty of using a “buy-or-bury” strategy to kill off competition by acquiring nascent rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion.

If successful, the government is likely to ask the judge to break up Meta through selling the two apps.

Still, legal experts cautioned, the F.T.C. faces an uphill climb to win. The government is asking a judge to look back more than a decade and prove that Meta stayed powerful by quashing competitors through its acquisitions. Regulators approved the Instagram and WhatsApp deals at the time, raising questions about why, experts said.

The suit against Meta is part of a broader push by U.S. regulators to rein in the power of the largest tech companies. The F.T.C. has also sued Amazon, accusing it of protecting a monopoly by squeezing sellers on its vast marketplace and favoring its own services.

The Department of Justice won a suit last year accusing Google of maintaining a monopoly in search, and a proceeding is set for next week to determine remedies for the violations. The D.O.J. has also sued Google over its dominance in ad technology. Apple was also a target of a suit by the government, which accused it of making it difficult for iPhone and iPad users to leave its ecosystem.

During opening statements in the Meta trial on Monday, the F.T.C. said the company’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp cemented its power, depriving consumers of other social-networking options and edging out competition.

Meta’s lawyers denied the allegations in opening statements, countering that the company faces plenty of competition from TikTok and other social media platforms. Trying to unwind the mergers after they had been approved a decade ago would set a dangerous precedent, the lawyers added.

On Tuesday, lawyers for the F.T.C. pressed Mr. Zuckerberg to explain internal communications that preceded the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which the company later bought. Mr. Zuckerberg’s notes, some of which date back 15 years, detailed fears about how Facebook could compete on mobile devices.

Daniel Matheson, lead litigator for the F.T.C., pointed to 2012 emails among Mr. Zuckerberg and his top executives, in which they traded candid thoughts on employee performance, potential and past acquisitions, and the threat of upstart competitors.

In one email to Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer, Mr. Zuckerberg told her he could teach her to play Settlers of Catan, a popular board game. He went on to criticize some lieutenants, saying that their lagging performance was one reason they needed to buy Instagram for $1 billion.

“A billion dollars is very expensive,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the stand.

In another email, from 2013, Mr. Zuckerberg told executives to block foreign competitors from advertising on Facebook, including popular Asian messaging apps like Kakao and WeChat.

“Those companies are trying to build social networks and replace us,” he wrote. “The revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk.”

Mr. Zuckerberg is expected to testify a total of seven hours. Ms. Sandberg and Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, will testify this week, the F.T.C. said.



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Some Online Scam Victims Can Now Seek Tax Relief on Firmer Ground

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Some Online Scam Victims Can Now Seek Tax Relief on Firmer Ground


Victims of sophisticated online scams are often dealt a double whammy. Not only is their money forever gone, but these stolen sums often generate giant tax bills when the funds are emptied from taxable retirement accounts.

Many of these victims are often left wondering what sort of recourse they might have. Tax regulators recently provided some answers, clearing the way for more victims to seek a tax break on more solid footing.

In a memorandum released on March 14, the Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Chief Counsel described which types of scams might qualify for tax relief, which included many investment schemes and some types of impersonation fraud. But it still excludes victims of other widespread digital crimes, including kidnapping schemes, for example, and romance-related fraud that did not involve investing.

“We are aware that taxpayers have suffered losses from various scams perpetrated by unknown individuals operating domestically and internationally,” the memo said. “However, the actual scam may vary, and the application of this advice is dependent on the taxpayer’s specific facts.”

There used to be a more equitable way for people with the largest fraud losses to deduct them from their income, using a tax deduction for victims of personal casualties, disasters and theft. But that and many other individual breaks were eliminated or narrowed as part of the Republican-led tax overhaul known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which helped to pay for broader tax cuts, including a reduced corporate tax rate.

The current structure of the deduction, effective from 2018 through 2025, treats victims unevenly. It can be used only in certain situations, even though many of these fraudsters are operating out of the same playbook.

The tax deduction, in its pared down form, says that personal casualty and theft losses can be claimed only in situations like federally declared disasters or “transactions entered into for profit.”

That means deductibility is an option only if the victims had a goal of profiting when they entered into transactions with scammers — but that definition wasn’t etched into the law. The new guidance provides taxpayers with parameters by laying out several different situations that qualify and a couple that don’t.

This includes taxpayers deceived by impersonators who claim to be fraud specialists at the victim’s financial institution, who then urge them to move their money to safer accounts because their existing ones have been compromised.

Since the victim intended to safeguard and later reinvest the money, the I.R.S. deems this “a transaction entered into for profit.” In other words, the guidance recognizes that the preservation of the assets qualifies as a profit motive (and is eligible for tax deduction).

“That opens the door a bit for more taxpayers to take theft loss deductions,” said James Creech, a director at the tax advocacy and controversy practice at Baker Tilly, a large accounting and advisory firm in San Francisco. “Practically what this means is that if you are audited you can take the memo, show it to the auditor, and most likely that will resolve the question of if the transaction was entered into for profit.”

Other qualifying situations include so-called pig butchering investment schemes, where unsuspecting people are directed to seemingly legitimate mobile apps or websites where they can buy cryptocurrencies and have the opportunity to earn large profits. As their account value increases, they invest more money — but when they try to cash out, the money vanishes. This, too, is deemed a profit-driven transaction by the I.R.S.

In another situation, the taxpayer gets a phishing email from an impersonator, urging them to call a fraud analyst to ensure their money is safeguarded; the impersonator instructs the victim to click on a link in an email, which gives them control over their computer, and eventually enables them to empty the victim’s investment account without their permission.

In all three cases, the taxpayer had contacted their financial institutions and law enforcement and were informed they had little to no chance of recovering the money.

The memo also outlines scenarios that would not qualify, in large part because there is no profit motive. So if an individual was deceived into paying medical bills for a scammer posing as a romantic interest, that would not be eligible for the tax deduction. The same goes for victims who sent ransom money to criminals who had claimed to have kidnapped their grandchild using artificial intelligence to clone the child’s voice.

The guidance also clarifies that none of these situations would be eligible for the tax breaks provided to victims of Ponzi schemes, which can be used when an investment fraud meets certain conditions.

Regardless of your specific situation, it helps to document everything as soon as you realize you’ve been victimized. File a police report with local officials and federal ones, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Take screenshots of any online platforms or apps that you used to communicate with the criminals, including online conversations, photos or anything related. Create a timeline or narrative of the events.

The casualty and theft loss deduction is set to revert to its original form at the end of this year if the sweeping 2017 tax law expires. But Republicans are trying to extend that package.

The original federal casualty loss deduction was limited in different ways. It could be claimed only by taxpayers who itemized deductions on their returns, which means the total amount of those deductions had to exceed the standard deduction for it to be worth it. And the deduction applied only to losses that exceeded 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

Lawmakers, including Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, have drafted legislation to offer more comprehensive and retroactive relief, dating back to 2018 when the deduction was curtailed. But that hasn’t been passed into law.

“This I.R.S. guidance provides a good deal of clarity and relief to a lot of scam victims, including a constituent of mine who would have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes,” Mr. Raskin said in a statement. “But we still have important bipartisan work to do in Congress to make the tax code fairer for all scam victims.”

The way the states treat these situations can amplify victims’ federal losses too, tax experts said, generating significant tax liabilities of their own. But some states are trying to address that.

Joseph Vogel, a Democratic state legislator in Maryland, said he recently introduced a bill with bipartisan support that would make these losses generally deductible at the state level.

“The scams are getting better and better,” he said. “These people need some relief.”



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American Airlines Will Offer Free Wi-Fi on Most Flights Next Year

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American Airlines Will Offer Free Wi-Fi on Most Flights Next Year


Beginning next year, if you catch an American Airlines flight, you won’t have to pay to watch shows or movies, keep up with the latest news or endlessly scroll your social media feeds to pass the time.

American Airlines will provide free high-speed Wi-Fi for its regular costumers on most flights, the company announced on Tuesday. In doing so, the airline will be among the last of the major domestic carriers to offer free internet connectivity.

The airline said that beginning in January 2026, members of its free AAdvantage loyalty program will have access to the wireless service, which will be available on 90 percent of the carrier’s fleet. The company said in a statement that it will be offering the perk on “more planes than any other domestic carrier.”

“Our customers greatly value staying connected while in the air, whether communicating with friends, getting work done, checking in on social media or streaming their favorite subscription services,” Heather Garboden, chief customer officer at American Airlines, said in the statement.

The airline will partner with AT&T to provide the service at no cost, it said. The connection will be powered by the satellite service providers Viasat and Intelsat, it added.

To connect, passengers will be required to enroll in the AAdvantage loyalty program, which accumulates loyalty points for travel with the carrier. Wi-Fi service, which is available on most of American’s routes, currently begins at $9.

The airline said that it is on pace to outfit more than 500 regional aircraft with high-speed wireless by the end of this year.

Other carriers already provide free Wi-Fi.

In 2023, Delta Air Lines introduced free Wi-Fi for most domestic flights through the airline’s SkyMiles program.

Last month, United Airlines announced that its free internet would be powered by Starlink, the satellite internet service founded by Elon Musk, and that some of its fleet will be equipped by the end of this year before rolling it out to every plane.



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Senators Investigate Private Equity Role in Soaring Fire-Truck Costs

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Senators Investigate Private Equity Role in Soaring Fire-Truck Costs


As fire departments around the country rep ort soaring prices and waiting times for new fire engines, two United States Senators are investigating the effect on public safety and the role that private equity investment has played in disrupting the firefighting equipment industry.

The senators — Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana — reported on Tuesday that they had heard from dozens of fire departments about delayed deliveries, defective parts and escalating prices. In a letter to the International Association of Fire Fighters, they said they were concerned that “private equity is padding shareholders’ wallets at the expense of public safety” and that they were seeking to learn more about the situation.

Over the past two decades, the private equity firm American Industrial Partners has acquired a number of specialty vehicle companies, including fire truck manufacturers, and has combined them into a single company called Rev Group. Company executives told analysts that they would substantially raise profit margins and that other companies were doing the same. Rev Group closed two manufacturing plants to streamline its operations.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that prices for fire trucks have soared in recent years and that manufacturers are taking longer to deliver vehicles. Rev Group has said it has a backlog of $4 billion in orders.

Industry leaders have said that the delays and rising prices stemmed from disruptions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, but some fire officials have blamed the problems at least partly on the industry’s consolidation.

Sue Finkam, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., said she raised the issue with Mr. Banks after she saw how quickly prices for new trucks were rising and how long they would take to be delivered. The estimated price of a new pumper vehicle rose about 10 percent in 2024 from the previous year, she said, while the wait time for a new tiller apparatus is now more than four years.

Ms. Finkam said her city was growing and needed to add more fire stations. But as matters stand now, she said, the city expects to be able to acquire land, design a fire station, construct the building, hire firefighters and train them, while still waiting for the station’s fire engines to be delivered. With the brunt of the pandemic now a few years in the past, she said, she hopes the senators will get answers about the soaring prices and delays.

“The taxpayers are going to be the ones shouldering the burden,” she said.

In Los Angeles, even before the wildfires that consumed whole neighborhoods earlier this year, the city fire department was struggling to maintain its aging fleet, and dozens of vehicles were out of service. Union officials said that rising prices for replacement vehicles had forced the department to order fewer new rigs than it had planned.

Ms. Warren said that the senators’ letter to the International Association of Fire Fighters was the first step in their investigation. She wants to encourage a broader congressional inquiry, and hopes that the Trump administration will get involved.

“Ultimately, when we don’t take care of our firefighters, we make it harder for our firefighters to take care of their communities,” Ms. Warren said in an interview.

Basel Musharbash, an antitrust lawyer who has done his own examination of fire truck manufacturing, said the consolidation in the industry had implications for public safety. But he said that similar private-equity roll-ups are reshaping many other sectors of the economy as well.

“What happened here is alarming and should hopefully attract a lot of attention, not just to the plight of fire departments but to the plight of lots of different industries that are dealing with private-equity-led consolidation,” Mr. Musharbash said.



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The U.S. Wants to Break Up Google and Meta. That Could Be Hard.

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The U.S. Wants to Break Up Google and Meta. That Could Be Hard.


The last time the courts seriously weighed the wisdom of breaking up a giant technology company was a quarter-century ago, after Microsoft was found to have illegally stifled competition in personal computer software.

A Federal District Court judge said yes to forcing Microsoft to split in two, separating its monopoly Windows operating system from its Office productivity products and other software. But an appeals court threw out the order, calling the breakup option “a remedy that is imposed only with great caution, in part because its long-term efficacy is rarely certain.”

In a pair of landmark proceedings this month in two Washington courtrooms, the issue of possibly breaking up a big tech company will be on the judicial table again.

In an antitrust trial that began on Monday, the Federal Trade Commission argued that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency seeks to force Meta to divest both. Next week at a separate trial, a federal judge will hear arguments from the Justice Department about why the court should break up Google in order to remedy the company’s monopoly in internet search.

“Divestiture can be an entirely acceptable remedy, depending on the severity of the harm,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and a former chairman of the F.T.C. “But it can be risky surgery.”

For generations, the courts have faced the quandary of what action to take in major antitrust cases once a dominant company has been found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior. In a 1947 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Robert H. Jackson memorably wrote that if a court’s solution did not open the market to competition, the government would have “won a lawsuit and lost a cause.”

But while a court’s ruling is based on examining facts in the past, its remedy looks to the future. The goal is to free up markets rather than hobble them — and create a competitive environment that results in more new ideas, new companies, more innovation and lower prices.

The challenge is taking on new significance as regulators make a major push to rein in the tech giants in a string of antitrust cases objecting to the power they have over communications, commerce and information.

In a different lawsuit against Google, the Justice Department is awaiting a judge’s decision on the company’s dominance in advertising technology. The department has also sued Apple over its tactics to protect its lucrative iPhone franchise. The F.T.C. has sued Amazon, saying the company illegally shielded its monopoly in online retailing from competition.

This wave of antitrust litigation, including appeals, is likely to last for years. And if the government wins any of its cases, a judge could order a breakup — the worst-case outcome for the companies.

History shows that these orders can be effective, antitrust experts said. But the results in improving competition has been mixed.

Standard Oil, an energy giant founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870, was the defining case of the progressive, trustbusting era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company was broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, split into 34 entities that had made up the original Standard Oil Trust, which controlled the oil industry’s production, refining, distribution and pricing. While that initially helped competition, over time the trust’s descendants became oil giants of their own, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.

The breakup of AT&T, in a settlement in 1982, followed a lengthy antitrust suit by the Justice Department, which accused the company of illegally monopolizing the telecommunications market in America. The local phone business was split into seven regional “Baby Bell” companies, and the order opened up the long-distance phone and telephone equipment markets, increasing competition and driving down prices.

In antitrust jargon, a “structural” solution like this generally means a breakup. But there are steps short of a forced sell-off that can shape markets and stimulate competition, antitrust experts said.

In 1969, under pressure from a government antitrust suit accusing it of monopolizing the computer market of its day, IBM unbundled its hardware from software — treating them as separate businesses, sold and priced independently. Software would no longer be “free,” included in the price of a computer. That helped ignite the rise of the commercial software industry, with Microsoft as the biggest winner.

Microsoft avoided a breakup, but its eventual settlement in 2001 contained a prohibition against contracts that had essentially used its Windows monopoly as a club by restricting personal computer makers from distributing the software of upstart rivals. That restraint kept the door open to new competition in browser software and search. Google was the leading beneficiary.

“Those were strong remedies without a breakup that created more competition,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale University School of Management.

The next powerful tech companies to face courtroom scrutiny are Meta and Google.

On Monday, the F.T.C. and Meta, formerly Facebook, presented their opening statements in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, then took the stand. The essence of the government’s case is that Facebook vastly overpaid more than a decade ago for Instagram and WhatsApp, to kill them off to protect a lucrative monopoly in social networking.

Meta replied that Instagram and WhatsApp had grown and flourished under its ownership. And, the company argued, there is plenty of competition in the social networking market, including the meteoric rise of TikTok.

Should the government win the Meta case, the likely remedial step, antitrust experts said, would be a court order to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

Next week in the same Washington court, Google faces the remedies stage in the lawsuit by the Justice Department and a group of states over its internet search monopoly. In August, Judge Amit P. Mehta found that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly.

To restore competition, the government asked the court to order Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and either spin off Android, its smartphone operating system, or be barred from making its services mandatory on Android phones. Chrome and Android are powerful distribution channels for Google search.

Google has described the government’s list as a “wildly overboard proposal” that “goes miles beyond the court’s decision” and that would harm consumers by offering them inferior products. The company has also said it will appeal.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University who was a White House adviser on technology and competition policy in the Biden administration, supports breakups in the Google and Meta cases.

“If you want to stir the pot, structural solutions are clean and essentially self-executing — you break it up and walk away,” he said. (Mr. Wu writes for The New York Times’s opinion section.)

But any breakup order would be appealed, and the higher courts today seem to echo the skepticism of the Microsoft era.

In a rare unanimous decision in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association could not use its market power to stop payments to student-athletes. It was essentially a wage price-fixing case, decided entirely for the plaintiffs.

Yet Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the court, digressed to make a broader point about judicial restraint in antitrust matters.

“In short,” he wrote, “judges make for poor ‘central planners’ and should never aspire to the role.”



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Assad Defaced: Syrians Destroy a Dictator’s Icons

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Assad Defaced: Syrians Destroy a Dictator’s Icons


As the rebels swept across Syria, symbols that had once seemed omnipresent collapsed.

In Aleppo, a statue of one of Mr. al-Assad’s brothers, Bassel al-Assad, on a horse was toppled. The horse remained. 

In a village north of Damascus, the capital, a giant statue of the ousted leader’s father, former President Hafez al-Assad, was felled.

The statues were carried away, possibly for scrap metal. 



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Trump Threatens Harvard’s Tax Status After Freezing Funds

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Trump Threatens Harvard’s Tax Status After Freezing Funds


President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed the administration’s demands aimed at purging “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses.

The move escalated the feud between the Trump administration and Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university.

“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

It’s the latest turn in a fight between Mr. Trump and academia more broadly, in which the Trump administration has been threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from various colleges and universities over diversity hiring practices and the tolerance of anti-Israel protests on campuses that sometimes included antisemitic behavior.

Last week, Harvard was sent a letter by the Trump administration demanding reforms and routine progress reports on how they were being implemented, in order to continue to “maintain” the financial relationship with the government. Harvard rejected the demand, and the Trump administration instituted a funding freeze of more than $2 billion.

Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand such a change, with an endowment totaling more than $50 billion. By contrast, Columbia University, which has a far smaller endowment, settled with the administration when it was pressed to make changes to its policies and programs.



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Stocks Edge Higher as Investors Assess Tariff Scenarios

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Stocks Edge Higher as Investors Assess Tariff Scenarios


Stocks inched higher in early trading on Tuesday, as the Trump administration’s chaotic tariff rollout continues to spur volatility in the markets.

The S&P 500 opened up 0.5 percent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq also gained slightly. President Trump’s whipsawing tariff policies are still driving sentiment on Wall Street, especially in sectors facing the threat of more levies or potential reprieves.

Here’s what else to know:

  • Bank stocks rose on Tuesday, as major U.S. lenders reported their latest earnings. Bank of America surpassed Wall Street’s profit and revenue expectations, and its shares rose about 5 percent Tuesday morning. Citigroup’s profits also beat estimates, sending its stock more than 2 percent higher.

  • Tariff threats are taking center stage in the pharmaceutical and technology sectors, after the Trump administration on Monday took steps that appeared likely to result in new tariffs on pharma products and semiconductors. Shares in drugmaker Eli Lilly were up slightly on Tuesday morning, while Novartis stock was trading roughly flat. Shares in chip giant Nvidia were nearly 2 percent higher, after the company on Monday said it would invest in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.

  • Shares in Boeing, the aviation giant, fell about 1.5 percent on Tuesday following a report from Bloomberg News that China had instructed its airlines to halt deliveries of Boeing planes after the Trump administration imposed steep tariffs on Chinese goods.

  • In the auto industry, shares in General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis — which jumped on Monday after Mr. Trump signaled that he might offer car companies some relief from tariffs — were mixed on Tuesday morning. Shares in General Motors and Ford both fell more than 1 percent, while Stellantis rose about a half percent. The sector, which is grappling with a 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles, is bracing for new levies on imported car parts.

  • The U.S. dollar, long a haven in global financial markets, has been falling against other major currencies. But an index that tracks the currency against a basket of major trading partners stabilized early Tuesday, ending a five-day slide.



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Trump Tariffs Could Raise iPhone Prices, But Affordable Options Remain

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Trump Tariffs Could Raise iPhone Prices, But Affordable Options Remain


On Friday, amid a tariff-induced frenzy that drove hordes of consumers to panic-buy iPhones, President Trump announced a tariff exemption on electronics like smartphones and computers. For a moment, widespread anxiety about a potential $2,000 iPhone dissipated.

But two days later, the Trump administration said smartphones and computers were likely to be hit with new tariffs targeting semiconductors, or chips. More expensive iPhones could come after all! Talk about whiplash.

Don’t panic. Even if tariffs did cause the iPhone’s price to surge, we would have plenty of cheaper options, like buying last year’s phone model instead of the latest and greatest.

The most important lesson we can learn from the turmoil: The only consistent way to save money on tech is to use devices for as long as possible, which requires maintaining them as you would a car, and upgrading only when you must.

“Buy the best and drive it into the ground,” said Ramit Sethi, a personal finance expert. “Holding that item for longer will bring down the overall cost of ownership.”

There remains lots of uncertainty around future costs of tech hardware in general. Nintendo this month canceled plans to start taking orders for its game console, the $450 Nintendo Switch 2, to evaluate the impact of tariffs on pricing and availability. Costs of some accessories, like phone chargers, power bricks and cases, have already risen on Amazon.

Here’s how to navigate tech purchases going forward.

The best way to save money on tech is, simply, to replace your devices less often.

To understand how personal tech impacts your finances, calculate the true cost of ownership, Mr. Sethi said. Each time we buy a new phone, we end up buying more than that. Extras like a protective case, additional data storage to hold more photos and apps, and an accessory such as a power charger or earbuds add up.

Take the iPhone 16 as an example. Its $800 price tag can easily inflate to $1,080, since you may also buy:

Your total cost of ownership over three years would be about $30 a month. You could then trade in your phone to offset the cost of a new one, but those savings would again be shaved away by the next phone case and other extras.

In contrast, if you bought the phone, along with those extras, and held on to it for six years, the total cost of ownership would shrink to $15 a month.

The same principle applies to other devices like computers and tablets: The longer you hold on to your belongings, the more value you squeeze out of them.

Tech products were built to be high-value, long-term investments, similar to cars. Many modern smartphones, tablets and computers were designed to last six to 10 years. But most of us still buy new phones every three years, according to research by Chetan Sharma, a consultant for phone carriers.

One common habit is largely to blame: We neglect to replace the battery, said Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that provides instructions and parts for repairing electronics.

Similar to car tires, phone batteries degrade and must be replaced after a certain amount of use, roughly every three years. An aged battery directly affects the speed and longevity of the phone. But the process of prying open a smartphone to remove a glued-down battery can be intimidating, and buying a new phone feels easier than visiting a repair shop.

Now is as good a time as ever to make replacing batteries a new habit. In the last few years, Apple, Google and others significantly improved their smartphone designs to make batteries easier to replace.

I, for one, used a hair dryer and cheap hand tools to melt the glue around my iPhone 14 and pried it open to replace the battery in less than an hour. It cost only about $50.

Apple and many phone repair shops will also do battery replacements for about $100; Apple will replace an aged battery for free for iPhones under warranty.

Repair costs are also expected to shoot up because most tech parts, like batteries and screens, come from China, according to three repair shops I interviewed. But even if a $100 battery becomes a $150 battery, that will be much cheaper than replacing an entire device, Mr. Wiens said.

Recent tech panic buying was driven in part by estimates from analysts speculating that tariffs could drive up the cost of some iPhone models to anywhere from $1,300 to $2,300. Apple declined to comment on whether tariffs would affect its iPhone pricing.

But even in the worst-case scenario, we would have plenty of cheaper options, just as we do when shopping for cars.

Car shoppers are well aware that they never have to buy the most recent model. They can look for used options or buy a previous year’s model for much cheaper. About 76 percent of cars sold in the United States are used, according to data by Consumer Affairs. Only 5 percent of phones are purchased in refurbished condition, meaning the products were used before being restored to like-new condition, according to research by Back Market, a site that sells refurbished tech gear.

Lauren Benton, a general manager at Back Market, said concern over tariffs appeared to be driving consumers toward older phones. Sales of a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro, which was released in 2023 for $1,000, were up significantly last week on the site, she said. The refurbished phone is selling for $639 and has a better camera than the latest $800 iPhone 16.

And if tariffs drive new phone prices up, the value of your older phone will go up, too, and trading it in would substantially offset costs, Ms. Benton said.

This is all to say don’t fear the hypothetical $2,000 iPhone.

And let’s be frank: If you’re worried about your personal finances in the current chaotic state of the economy, you should probably be thinking about more important issues than phone upgrades, like your emergency savings fund, Mr. Sethi said.

“These discussions remind me of someone seeing their entire house on fire, and what they are doing is calmly changing their shoelaces,” he said. “Panic buying an iPhone is number 662 on the list of things I would be doing.”



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Santa Lives in Rovaniemi, Finland. Some of His Neighbors Are Not Thrilled.

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Santa Lives in Rovaniemi, Finland. Some of His Neighbors Are Not Thrilled.


“Do these have cheese in them?” he asked.

She saw more tourists in snowmobile suits lingering by the cashier. Before they could make eye contact, she got out of there.

“I was thinking: Here we go again,” she said.

These were small impositions, but enough was enough. If you’re blond and therefore identifiable as a likely native of Rovaniemi, you can barely move around a supermarket during tourist season — and it’s all Santa’s fault.

A simple marketing idea, playing off a cherished childhood fantasy, has made a small city on the edge of the Arctic Circle almost unlivable for many people who live there. And it’s not just the needy tourists in the dairy or cracker aisle. It’s also the noisy Airbnbs, the escalating housing crunch, the sidewalks so crowded you can’t walk down them without bumping into people, and the car doors slamming in the middle of the night.

And it all started when the Nazis came to town.

Early in World War II, Finland allied with the Nazis, who built a big base in Rovaniemi, a Lapland railway hub. But by October 1944, the Nazis were losing and the Soviet Red Army was marching into Eastern Europe. As a little memento for the Finns and the Russians, the retreating German soldiers burned Rovaniemi to the ground.

That left a blank canvas. So after the war, Finland asked Alvar Aalto, the celebrated Finnish architect, to redesign the city. Aalto, known for his bold churches, concert halls and kitchen stools, came up with an idea: Why not remake the ruined town in the shape of a reindeer head, with the peripheral roads shooting out like antlers, to honor the area’s connection to reindeer herding?



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