Can equipment manufacturers design their products to be free of harmonics?

Yes they can, but lowering the current distortion levels at the input to the SMPS in a computer will add to the cost of the computer. This is not a step that computer manufacturers wish to take because of the continuous and intense cost cutting in the computer industry.

Actually it is less costly overall to provide a harmonic mitigating transformer to feed several hundred computers than it is to improve the operation of the SMPS in each computer. This is especially true when we consider that the added cost of the improved SMPS will reappear every three years when a new computer system is purchased.

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