Enterprises planning to refresh their fleets have some unwelcome news: PC prices are not coming down anytime soon, and the elevated costs could last until the end of 2027.
According to a press release issued last week alongside IDC’s third-quarter 2026 PC Tracker, the market is squeezed from both sides—constrained supply and surging memory and component costs—while a shaky global economy and geopolitical tensions show no sign of easing the pressure.
Why PC prices keep climbing
The core problem is straightforward: memory and storage are eating up a growing slice of every PC’s bill of materials, and suppliers aren’t adding capacity fast enough to push costs back down. That trend is expected to intensify rather than reverse.
Enterprises and their channel partners responded to anticipated memory-driven price hikes earlier in the year by stocking up on inventory. But demand then dried up, forcing makers and resellers to spend the third quarter clearing out that leftover stock instead of selling new machines.
“Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand,” IDC research director Jitesh Ubrani said, per the press release.
The low-cost PC is getting harder to find
As prices rise, the value segment is shrinking. HP is deliberately shifting its product mix toward higher-priced machines to generate more revenue even as overall shipments fall.
“We continue to expect memory and storage costs to increase further as a percentage of the bill of materials,” HP CFO Karen Parkhill said on an August earnings call, adding that the company is prioritizing “higher-value unit placements, repricing for higher commodity costs” to offset lower volume.
Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates says enterprises had already pulled in new PCs earlier in the year in anticipation of price increases and are now pulling back—partly because makers are passing higher component costs straight onto customers.
Q3 2026 shipments collapse 20.1%
The third quarter of 2026 was brutal across the board. Global PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year, reflecting both the demand suppression and the inventory digestion described above.
Lenovo led the pack, shipping 14.9 million units—a 22.6% decline from the same quarter last year—and holding a 23.8% market share. HP came in second with 10.3 million units, down 30.9% year over year and a 16.5% share. Dell placed third with 7.6 million shipments, down 25%.
Apple weathered the downturn better than its Windows rivals, shipping 5.9 million units, an 11.3% year-over-year drop. Asus and other makers accounted for the remainder of the market.
The real question: do AI PCs justify their price?
Many new machines ship with AI hardware accelerators and qualify as “AI PCs.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last week that AI PCs now account for 40% of PC shipments, while HP said AI machines made up 46% of its shipments in the fiscal quarter ending July 31.
Vendor-specific AI features are landing too. HP is rolling out its own on-device AI software called HP IQ, and HP PCs include an AI-based security tool from Wolf Security designed to defend against BIOS-level intrusion, per HP personal systems president Ketan Patel.
But Gold argues companies are rethinking the typical three-to-four-year upgrade cycle because most enterprise AI work still runs in the cloud. “They have been spending big on infrastructure and cloud services to implement new AI solutions, which don’t need the latest PC hardware,” he said.
The industry is now pushing even more powerful machines—dubbed “agentic AI PCs”—that run AI locally to cut token costs. Microsoft has branded this hardware category “Builder PCs.” Models like Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and HP’s ZBook Ultra G3a mobile workstation carry GPUs capable of running high-end large language models, but they cost more than $2,500—potentially too steep for cash-strapped buyers.
“Whether that really means the category has been reinvented is still up for debate,” Technalysis Research analyst Bob O’Donnell wrote in a research note.
What this means for you
If you’re buying a PC for yourself or refreshing a business fleet, expect to pay more than you have in recent years, and that premium could persist through the end of 2027. The cheapest models are the first to vanish from shelves, so if you need a budget machine, shop for it now rather than waiting for a dip that may not come.
For enterprises especially, the math is shifting. If your team’s AI workloads live in the cloud, the latest AI PC hardware may not be worth the upgrade—money might be better spent on the cloud services themselves.
What to do about it
Delay non-essential upgrades if you can. If you must buy, lock in pricing quickly before memory-driven hikes push prices higher still, and weigh whether a mid-tier machine meets your needs instead of chasing the priciest “Builder PC” options.
Source: Computerworld
Over to you: With most AI workloads running in the cloud, would you hold off on upgrading your PC, or pay up for the latest AI hardware?
