New research from Counterpoint corroborates that the PC market has finally been impacted by the memory crisis to the extent that global shipments have gone down for the first time since the first quarter of 2025. In the second quarter this year there were 4% fewer global PC shipments than the same time last year. This backs up what the IDC reported earlier this month.
Counterpoint explains: “While commercial refresh cycles tied to Windows migration and AI PC adoption continue to support demand, surging memory prices and higher component costs are increasingly constraining OEM production plans and suppressing consumer demand. The sharp increase in DRAM prices has significantly raised PC bill-of-material (BoM) costs, forcing OEMs to implement price increases, reduce entry-level configurations, or prioritize higher-margin premium systems.”
This year-on-year figure cashes out in part as a 2% decrease from Lenovo, an 8% decrease from HP, and a 6% decrease from Dell. Asus and Apple, however, both actually had growth—the former by 4% and the latter by a whopping 13%, likely thanks to the cheap and cheerful MacBook Neo. Given the overall number of shipments for the brands, however, these two companies’ increase in shipments don’t offset the overall picture, and there was still a decline overall.
In other words, despite the push to get yourself an AI PC for this LLM era and despite the need for a modern PC to run Windows 11, things are just too damn expensive right now. Of course we’ve known about increasing component costs (especially RAM) for a long while now, but it hasn’t been completely clear when that would force PC makers into raising costs to the extent that people stop buying them.