GoKawiilThe personal computer has remained surprisingly resilient to change over the past 15 years. Apple promised a “post-PC” era with the iPad in 2010 and failed to deliver one. Smartphones even overtook laptops as the most popular device to connect to the internet a decade ago, but millions of people still kept buying PCs every year. But this PC resiliency is going to be tested even further this year.
RAM and NAND / SSD prices have surged in recent months due to shortages created by AI data center demand. Some stores have had to sell memory like it’s lobster, prebuilt PC costs have risen, and some assemblers are even selling PCs without RAM.
Now, we’re about to see how the shortage hits regular laptops and PCs from the likes of Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, and Acer. TrendForce predicts that memory prices are projected to “rise sharply again in the first quarter of 2026.” More price rises will only put further pressure on laptop and PC pricing, and we’re seeing early signs that PC makers are adjusting prices at CES this week.
Asus announced to its channel partners this week that it’s implementing price hikes across its products as a result of the memory market conditions. Dell also adjusted the launch pricing of its XPS 14 and XPS 16 just hours before they were announced this week, in a sign that laptop pricing is going to become increasingly fluid. Lenovo has been stockpiling PC memory to try and weather the storm throughout 2026, and HP has warned it will have to increase prices and offer lower RAM configurations later this year. Like Lenovo, HP also has a stockpile of memory, but it expects the continued rise in costs will begin eating into PC product margins by May.
There’s no quick fix for PC makers, either. Offering less RAM on laptops will be difficult for manufacturers, particularly below the 8GB threshold. Windows 11 has a minimum RAM requirement of 4GB, but it doesn’t run particularly well in those conditions. While TrendForce predicts some smartphones are likely to return to just 4GB this year, “for budget notebooks, DRAM cannot be reduced quickly due to processor pairing needs and operating system limitations.”
The timing of this memory shortage couldn’t be any worse for Microsoft and its PC partners. Windows 10 just hit end of life in October, and many businesses are in the process of migrating to Windows 11. That often involves a PC refresh cycle, and there were strong signs throughout 2025 that PC shipments were accelerating thanks to a refresh of the existing install base. That momentum could be derailed later this year once RAM stockpiles are depleted.
Timing isn’t the only problem for the PC market, as the increased prices of RAM and SSDs could be permanent instead of a temporary supply constraint. “This is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity,” warns IDC. “For decades, the production of DRAM and NAND Flash for smartphones and PCs was the primary driver for production. Today, that dynamic has inverted.”
The demand from hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon has pushed Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to pivot toward building high-bandwidth (HBM) and high-capacity DDR5 memory. “Every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop,” says IDC.
This is going to have a big impact on the DIY market and PC gaming, too. “PC gaming is thriving at a time when overall consumer PC shipments have declined by 14 percent in the last five years… annual gaming PC shipments are up 50 percent,” said Henry Lin, director of product management at Nvidia, in a briefing with The Verge last week.
The popularity of PC gaming has allowed smaller assemblers to offer custom prebuilt systems at competitive prices. These smaller builders can’t stockpile RAM or SSDs, and “will bear the greatest burden of the shortage,” warns IDC. “That in turn represents an opportunity for large OEMs to gain share from smaller assemblers in the gaming space by positioning prebuilt systems as offering higher value.”
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