GoKawiilNew research data from Omdia shows U.S. shipments of desktop PCs and laptops fell by 7% year on year in Q1 of this year, totaling just 15.8 million devices. Compounded at both ends, this figure comes from strong Q1 2025 sales as companies and individuals rushed to get ahead of President Trump's tariffs, and the ongoing component shortages, which have driven up prices to unreasonable levels for just about everything.
This decline is the worst since the end of 2023, and is most evident in the lower-end segment. As prices have risen, people haven't been able to buy as many new systems, and those they do buy are more expensive. Average PC prices are predicted to exceed $1,000 by the end of the year, alongside consecutive year-on-year declines in overall sales.
The silver lining to all this is that it isn't projected to last forever. Omdia's data suggests PC sales will start to recover in 2027, and by 2028, are estimated to reach similar levels to 2025, driven by a resurgence in consumer spending. Funnily enough, that coincides with when we're expecting to see new memory fabs come online.
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These predictions largely line up with a report from IDC from earlier this year, but even that pessimistic outlook on the year didn't have average selling prices crossing $1,000 so soon.
Pricing everyone out
Nobody who's considered or purchased an upgrade for their PC or laptop in the past year is unaware of price rises, but Omdia's data makes it very clear: ultra budget computing is being eaten alive by component shortages. Shipments of sub-$500 PCs declined 18.7 year on year for the first quarter of 2026. This stat is a key driver of the 14.4% drop in PC shipments when compared to 2025.
That's because people are just buying less, rather than buying more expensive systems. Although Omdia tracked an average 4% increase in PC selling prices in Q1, that isn't even remotely reflective of the price rises we've seen on individual components and systems. We've been reporting on these individual component price rises for months, with consistent memory supply shortages, which can be linked to production of HBM, over commodity DRAM. This has caused memory prices to increase by hundreds of percent; almost all major PC makers, including Apple, have faced price hikes on their products.
This has led to the average price of a PC set to reach over $1,000 for the first time this year. Prices are expected to increase 12% year on year in Q2, rising as high as 15% by Q4 2026.
It's not just consumers driving this, though. With businesses looking to buy up "AI PCs," capable of handling local language model processing, they're spending more to get them. The overall share of AI PCs grew to 44% in Q1 this year, though that could also be because manufacturers' definitions of an AI PC have been fairly fast and loose.
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