Hardware

You mean just the brand, or the manufacturing?

I mean, branding something is trivial.

But if you want to manufacture it in Europe, then you have to compete against companies who are going to be manufacturing in China, and manufacturing wages are going to be lower in China, so it's going to be at a price disadvantage.

I was just commenting yesterday where some guy wanted to buy a keyboard out of the EU or Canada instead of a Unicomp keyboard because he was pissed at the US. He was asking about buying a Cherry keyboard. Cherry just shut down their production in Germany after cheaper Chinese competition clobbered 'em.

If you want to have stuff manufactured in Europe, you've got kinda limited options.

1. Get some kind of patriotic "buy European" thing going, where people are intrinsically willing to pay a premium for things made in Europe.

2. Ban imports. My guess is that in general, Europe will not do this unless they have some negative externality, like national security, associated with the import (think, say, Russian natural gas), since it's economically-inefficient.

3. Leverage some kind of other comparative advantage. Like, okay. Maybe one can't have competitive unskilled assembly line workers. But maybe if there's really amazing, world-leading industrial automation, so that there's virtually no human labor marginal cost involved, and one scales production way up, it's possible to eliminate enough of the assembly line labor costs to be competitive.