PC Shipments Plunge 22.4% in Third Quarter as Memory Costs Bite, Gartner Reports
Worldwide PC shipments fell 22.4% year over year in the third quarter of 2026, totalling 55.4 million units, as soaring memory and storage costs forced buyers to postpone purchases, according to preliminary data released by Gartner on October 12.
The numbers mark one of the steepest quarterly declines the industry has seen in years, and they carry a clear explanation: the AI boom’s hunger for memory has left the traditional PC market starved. DRAM costs surged five times year over year in the second quarter, and PC vendors passed those higher component costs straight on to customers, driving the third-quarter collapse.
“The impact of higher memory and storage costs is now fully reflected in PC pricing,” said Namrata Banerjee, Principal Research at Gartner, in the firm’s statement. PC shipments have fallen to levels last seen in early 2023 — though, as Banerjee noted, the dynamics differ: this time the cause is not excess inventory but higher prices, vendor-led reprioritisation of scarce components, and a shift toward pricier configurations.
The consumer squeeze
The sharpest pain landed on ordinary buyers. The reduction in the availability of lower-cost devices made replacement purchases less affordable for consumers, while businesses focused their spending on targeted investments such as workstations and AI PCs rather than broad-based deployments, according to Gartner.
All of the top six worldwide PC vendors experienced shipment declines in the quarter. Lenovo remained the market leader, with shipments falling 22.4% in line with the overall market — a showing the firm credited to its supply-chain scale and broader AI and infrastructure portfolio. HP recorded the steepest decline at 30.9%, though it held its No. 2 position, while Apple recorded the smallest decline of the top six and gained 1.7 percentage points of market share, supported by its mainstream MacBook lineup.
What comes next
The deeper story is about where the silicon goes. Memory manufacturers have been prioritising the high-margin chips feeding AI data centres, leaving consumer DRAM supply tight and expensive. Until that allocation loosens — or capacity catches up — PC makers face a holiday quarter with thin shelves at the affordable end.
For consumers, the advice embedded in the data is uncomfortable but simple: the cheap laptop is temporarily an endangered species. For enterprises, the quarter accelerates an existing trend toward fewer, more capable machines, with institutions from New York’s school system to governments rethinking how computing budgets are spent, even as regulators like the UK data watchdog squeeze the AI giants driving the memory crunch. The full figures are available in Gartner’s press release.
