Global PC shipments crater 20% as rising prices hammer demand

The global PC market has taken a beating, with shipments plunging more than 20 percent in the third quarter as the AI-driven memory shortage pushes up prices and buyers decide their existing machines will do just fine.

New figures from Omdia show worldwide shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year-on-year to 58.1 million units in Q3 2026.

IDC tells a similar story, estimating a 20.1 percent decline to 62.7 million units.

The research firms differ on shipment totals, but agree the market has gone from bad to considerably worse.

The downturn follows a rush to buy PCs earlier this year, when manufacturers, distributors, and corporate customers brought forward orders to get ahead of anticipated price increases.

That helped prop up shipments in the first half of 2026, but left the industry with a pile of inventory and fewer buyers in the third quarter.

IDC said shipments fell 9.1 percent from Q2, bucking the usual seasonal pattern in which back-to-school demand lifts the PC market.

"What we're seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in," said Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC.

"Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2." Much of the trouble stems from the AI industry's appetite for memory and storage, which has left PC makers competing for increasingly expensive components.

The shortage was already taking its toll in Q2, when IDC initially reported a 4.9 percent decline in shipments, since revised to 3.8 percent.

Omdia estimates that DRAM and SSDs now account for nearly 40 percent of a PC's component costs, up from around 15 percent previously, following more than fourfold price increases.

Shortages of processors, graphics cards, and other integrated circuits are also adding to manufacturers' woes.

The damage is being felt across the industry's biggest names.

Lenovo retained its position as the world's largest PC vendor, shipping 14.9 million units, although IDC estimates that represents a 22.6 percent decline from a year earlier.