Wow. A person could perhaps not cover, but at least nicely subsidize, the cost of a trip to Australia by hand-carrying a couple of laptops with them... wonder how many you can bring through Customs before they start to get suspicious?

It reminds me of my family from the UK when they used to travel to the US decades ago. They'd go home with half a dozen pairs of jeans each, and nearly pay for their tickets.

If any of them are still in the box you'll be enjoying a nice customs bill (doubly so because you definitely didn't declare them)

Even if you exclude the cost of shipping to purchase it, it becomes a significant risk if something were to go wrong and you needed to ship it back for repair.

Shipping it to the US and then back might involve not only stupid expensive shipping, but also having to figure out paperwork for both Australian and US Customs, unless you want to potentially pay double import-duties on each side.

I did it with Lenovo laptops years ago, because buying from the US and with shipping it still worked out to be around 1/3 the price of buying it from the AU Lenovo store, and Lenovo had a Global warranty program on their Thinkpad line. Smaller OEMs without that, I wouldn't risk it.

There was a point in history, where it was cheaper to fly to the US, buy photoshop and fly back to Australia.