The PC market has been volatile over the past few years. At least 2025 was better, with PC shipments growing 3% year-on-year in Q4 2025, reaching 18.2 million units.
The increase in PC shipments can be attributed to multiple factors, including retailers securing inventory ahead of the anticipated memory and storage supply shortage, the peak of Windows 11 commercial refreshes as users upgrade from outdated Windows 10 PCs, and holiday-season demand.
But now, the market has hit a slump again. According to research and consultancy firm Omdia, PC shipments in the US will likely decline 13% year-on-year due to these shortages. The same can also be said about PC shipments in the Asia-Pacific market.
What's worse, the price of PCs and memory is expected to skyrocket by 60%.
Q4 marked a meaningful inflection point for the US PC market. After two quarters of year-on-year decline, the market returned to growth driven by solid performances across both the consumer and commercial segments. Consumer shipments rose 6% to 8.2 million units - the fourth consecutive quarter of annual growth - underpinned by holiday spending and a product mix shift to more affordable price ranges. The commercial segment grew 4% as enterprises continued their Windows 11 migration, particularly in the final stretch before the Windows 10 end-of-support deadline in October.
Kieren Jessop, Research Manager at Omdia
Omdia indicates that memory and storage costs have increased by 40–70% since 2025, prompting the firm to forecast that 60% increase in the estimate for mainstream PC memory and storage costs in Q1 2026.
But perhaps more concerningly, the storage and memory supply crisis will likely have the greatest impact on entry-level PCs. "As thinner margins and lower allocation priority constrain the low-end market, smaller vendors are especially at risk of being squeezed out of the market,” Jessop added.
Right now, memory manufacturers seem more inclined to sell RAM to gigantic AI-centric businesses because it's more profitable. If this trend continues, entry-level PCs will likely disappear from the market completely by 2028 (via Tom's Hardware).
Famously, Apple recently unveiled the MacBook Neo at $599, bucking industry trends with a few entry‑level trade‑offs. Perhaps most notably, swapping the scarcer M‑series chips for the iPhone 16’s A18 Pro processor. Additionally, the iPhone maker shipped the MacBook Neo with 8GB of RAM, keeping the entry-level cost down while reflecting the tight DRAM supply, and sparking more debate on RAM requirements in macOS vs. Windows.
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