Global PC shipments fell about 20% year-over-year in Q3 2026, with Omdia estimating a 21.2% drop and IDC a 20.1% drop, as PC makers worked through stock they bought early and buyers balked at prices inflated by memory and storage costs. Even Apple shipped 11.3% fewer Macs, according to both trackers.
Funnily enough, the crash comes when Windows 11 is in its best shape in years. Also, in case you were living under a mountain, the entire PC market (including Apple) is doubling down on AI, which was the whole reason for the PC shipments debacle.
That said, Windows 11 just got a trick that can reduce a PC’s dependence on the universally despised Data Centers.
PC shipments plunged 20% as memory prices hit buyers
Omdia counts 58.1 million desktops, notebooks and workstations shipped in Q3, the steepest annual decline since Q1 2023. IDC puts it at 62.7 million, which is also 9.1% lower than Q2, even though the third quarter usually beats the second.
Both trackers blame a pull-forward. PC makers and channel partners stocked up in the first half of 2026 to get ahead of memory-driven price hikes, leaving Q3 with plenty of inventory and very little demand.
Omdia’s Ben Yeh says DRAM and SSDs now make up “nearly 40%” of a PC’s material cost, up from around 15%. According to Omdia’s breakdown, the parts inside a mainstream laptop that sold for $699 in Q1 2025 cost $435 back then. By Q3 2026, the parts cost $699, as much as the whole laptop used to.
HP took the biggest hit at around 31%, while Apple gained share, as Omdia says its premium positioning softened the blow of higher prices.
Omdia expects a 24% decline in Q4 and another 7% in 2027. IDC’s Jitesh Ubrani says channels may run promotions to clear stock, “but we don’t expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago.”
Windows 11 is getting better, but cheaper PCs are getting harder to build
After a 2025 full of broken updates, Microsoft promised to fix Windows 11 in March, and Satya Nadella repeated it in July.
In our testing, my three-year-old 16GB laptop used up to 2GB less RAM after a restart on Windows 11 26H2, and apps opened noticeably faster.
The July update sped up shutdowns and File Explorer, and Marcus Ash says Insiders can feel Windows 11 speeding up in Experimental builds.
The September update lets you remove web results from Search, which made it crazy fast in our testing. Microsoft is now testing a Search rebuilt on WinUI 3, and WinUI’s latest experimental release added table and chart controls and a memory fix, after years of developers picking web wrappers, exclusively for Windows!
The bigger promise is optimizing Windows 11 for 8GB PCs by the end of 2026, and Windows boss Pavan Davuluri cited the rising cost of memory as the reason. OEMs are bringing back 8GB laptops, but one 8GB PC owner said RAM usage was still at 96% on 26H2, so the 8GB work probably hasn’t shipped yet, as far as I know. When it does, cheap laptops could finally feel usable.
Of course, faster software won’t make DRAM cheaper. If anything, a better Windows 11 gives people one more reason to keep their current PC a little longer.
Microsoft wants local AI on PCs, but the AI boom is making PCs more expensive
IDC blames the higher prices on the “AI data center build out.” On October 7, Microsoft held its first big Windows event in two years and spent most of it on AI, and the comments under the livestream and on X were mostly people asking Microsoft to fix Windows instead.
To be fair, the pitch was different this time. With hybrid intelligence, Davuluri says Windows will run AI on your PC “where it makes sense” and in the cloud “when it needs to.” In theory, every task that runs locally is one less request for a data center, and data centers are what’s eating the world’s memory supply.
Local AI needs a lot of memory, too. Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599.99 with 24GB, but Microsoft’s AI benchmarks used the 64GB model, which costs $4,299.99.
I suspect Microsoft or NVIDIA is eating some of that cost, or it’s an introductory price. The 128GB Surface costs $5,899.99, while ASUS’s ProArt P14 goes up to around $6,500 with 128GB.
Microsoft’s Surface RTX Spark Dev Box costs $5,999 with 128GB, which is more than the laptop. Sure, it has an extra 1TB of storage, but it has no display, keyboard or battery!
PC makers need to give people a reason to upgrade
Apple has Apple Intelligence, Windows 11 has agents, and shipments are down for both. In my opinion, PC makers and Microsoft mistook their own excitement about AI for what buyers want. AI PCs were supposed to start an upgrade wave, and instead, people are holding on to what they have.
Windows 11 is finally fixing the basics. Now the industry needs a PC that does the basics well at a price people can pay, with AI as a bonus instead of the monotonous AI this, AI that sales pitch.
