If one thing was clear to me at CES 2026, it's that PC hardware has never looked better. The big laptop brands, including Lenovo, HP, Dell, and ASUS, showed off impressive new devices, all while carefully skirting around the issue of rising memory and storage prices.
The fresh crop of 2026 hardware, undoubtedly in the works long before AI firms bought up global DRAM supplies in order to build datacenters — which is now also occurring with the NAND chips that go into storage — struck a dissonant chord. Who's going to be able to afford this stuff when the storage and memory alone cost as much as an entire laptop?
While some of the products already unveiled for 2026 will likely see some configuration changes in order to keep prices down, the next major hardware refresh that these companies perform could look a lot different.
Here are the four laptop features I'm expecting will get worse (or disappear completely) as the big laptop brands attempt to offset rising RAM and SSD costs.
1) High-resolution, high-quality displays
2025 was the year of OLED, and I couldn't be happier. Believe me, once you've tried OLED, it's all you want to have in front of you. More laptops than ever launched with OLED displays, and I'm not just talking about the premium market segment.
That's mainly due to the cost of OLED panels dropping so sharply in the past few years, helped along by new QD-OLED and mini-LED tech entering the market. However, OLED panels are still more expensive than traditional IPS fare, and I won't be surprised to see the trend of plenty dry up as laptop makers focus on cutting costs.
The same goes for pixels. The more you have on a screen, the more expensive it gets. Screens with 2.8K, 3K, and 4K resolutions were everywhere in 2025, but a return to the more traditional 1920x1200 (FHD+) layout by many brands wouldn't be shocking.
2) Powerful discrete graphics cards
Laptop graphics cards have come a long way over the years, and it still boggles my mind that so much power and heat can be contained in a relatively slim laptop body.
Even though NVIDIA's RTX 5090 Laptop GPU is basically a desktop RTX 5080 dressed up with a different name, its power is no joke. And it fits into something like the dual-screen ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo? Incredible.
All of that extra engineering to keep the chip cool and its power balanced does come at a price, however, not to mention the cost of the actual hardware itself.
The removal of discrete GPUs in anything but gaming and workstation laptops was already sort of a trend that filtered in as integrated graphics attached to CPUs have gotten better, so it's not hard to see more of the same in the future.
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3) Webcam and speaker quality
Webcams, and especially speakers, in Windows laptops have evolved to generally be, dare I say it, exceptional. Even laptops in the budget category are arriving with video and audio that you'd only find in the premium segment just a few years ago. Not to mention Windows Hello facial recognition abilities, thanks to built-in IR sensors, are becoming more common.
But as the big laptop brands target components to downgrade to offset storage and memory costs, I expect webcams and speakers to be placed in the crosshairs. I consider these areas to be non-essential for a lot of users, especially if they're only using their PC for email, spreadsheets, word processing, and other general tasks.
The blow will certainly be felt by those who frequently video conference or who enjoy using their laptop as a multimedia centerpiece, and I expect quality video and audio to once again be reserved for the more expensive tier of laptops.
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4) Plentiful RAM and storage configurations
This one is a no-brainer, but it's definitely worth including on the list.
The big PC makers aren't having as much trouble as the rest of us sourcing memory and storage thanks to longstanding agreements with hardware manufacturers, but that doesn't mean that there's no trouble.
Whereas 16GB seems to have taken over as the base amount of RAM in modern laptops, I won't be surprised to see a return to 8GB for introductory "base" laptop models. Sure, laptop makers will still offer higher specs, but whether or not you can afford them is another question.
Similarly, the standard of seeing 1TB SSDs in laptops will likely change as storage prices continue to rise. A return to 512GB drives in even the high-end laptops won't surprise me, and I expect that base models will be commonly available with 256GB (or less). Eek — I hope you don't mind paying for cloud storage.
Do you agree with what I've predicted to be the laptop features and components most likely to decline in quality (or completely disappear)? Let me know in the comments section!
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