Gartner previously projected AI PCs would reach 50% market penetration before the end of the decade, but rising memory prices on premium-tier hardware will also push that milestone back to 2028. AI PCs, of course, require more onboard memory to run local inference workloads, making them especially exposed to DRAM cost increases.
Longer upgrade cycles will follow directly from higher prices, and Gartner says that PC lifetimes will extend by 15% for business buyers and 20% for consumers by the end of 2026, a trend it noted will raise concerns about security vulnerabilities on aging hardware.
For the PC market, demand will increasingly concentrate at the top end, where vendors carry enough margin to absorb component inflation without destroying profitability. Gartner advised vendors to accept unit volume decline rather than cut prices to chase budget buyers. "Overall, device vendors and channels face a critical window in the first half of 2026 to optimize pricing and protect margins before component inflation compresses profitability from the second quarter onwards," Atwal said.
The forecast covers smartphones as well, where shipments are projected to fall 8.4% this year. Gartner estimated basic smartphone buyers will exit the market five times faster than premium buyers in 2026 as rising costs push consumers toward refurbished or second-hand alternatives.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04, @03:30AM
You are literally worthless to us
and we will use every trick in the
book to make your personal computer
break in the future.
--signed
your rent-seeking uberlords
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04, @04:51AM (2 children)
Gartner, having been wrong, doubles down on their claim -- in the future -- and makes a very similar claim to accompany the first, incorrect, claim.
Cool, dude.
If the bubble even keeps going in 2028. Sigh.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 04, @01:13PM
That org is like the weatherman, wrong half of the time but people don't care they'll keep right on watching.
Any advice that starts with "Gartner says..." can be disregarded out of hand. It came from Gartner so its almost certainly inaccurate in some way.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday March 05, @08:47AM
That's their (wrong) assumption, the bubble will continue to inflate forever. When it does pop, "AI" anything will be seen as toxic garbage and no-one will want "AI PCs" any more, and there'll be a massive glut of RAM and SSDs from cancelled data centres driving prices down. So a better prediction would be "entry-level PCs will be configured with registered ECC DDR5 bought at disposal auctions by 2028".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04, @05:12AM (4 children)
Even if the AI bubble doesn't collapse by then, they will just increase RAM production. Current prices are unsustainable all around.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Wednesday March 04, @05:46AM (2 children)
But increasing RAM production would require building expensive new facilities, and nobody's sure when the AI bubble will pop.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Wednesday March 04, @02:20PM (1 child)
Repeatedly convicted for price fixing memory companies see no reason prices should ever fall.
You can trust them than the massive price spikes after coordination with AI companies is totally organic, with no collusion involved at all.
They pinky swear there is no solution, so you know they can be trusted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday March 04, @03:47PM
The price fixing scandal and resulting court cases are why TV prices are as low as they are. Maybe there's issues with RAM manufacturers as well. I remain to be convinced that it's not just the market being horrible.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday March 04, @04:58PM
Maybe, nVidia GPU prices still haven't returned to any sort of reasonable price for entry level systems since they got addicted to crypto dollars. There's no guarantee at all that they won't decide that there isn't enough profit in those lower priced systems to do any of the investment that would lead to the process returning to where they should be. Every time I've looked at nVidia GPUs over the last few years the price of just the GPU itself is practically the cost of an entry level system with AMD or Intel GPUs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Wednesday March 04, @05:28AM
So basically just noise within the error margin, given that the length of hardware upgrade cycles can be increased very easily by several hundred percent, simply by running an OS that does only what the user tells it to do, instead of one that wastes oodles of CPU cycles and main memory on doing what the OS vendor (or, just as bad, the init system developer) wants it to do.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 04, @01:10PM
It's fake news, endlessly reguritated and re-eaten and repeated until this article.
Moving up the human centipede food chain we see the original source:
https://www.alixpartners.com/insights/102jsm5/the-emergence-and-user-demand-for-ai-pcs/ [alixpartners.com]
I see the "users" were surveyed if they'd like better battery management and even more shit in their notification tray "monitoring" their systems. Then redefine those requests to mean installing MCP agents on every PC to monitor and control the PC remotely, by a possibly friendly or possible hostile set of corporations and governments. Then throw in the undocumented claim that they're "willing to pay a premium" (how much? $1? $10000?). Ignore the list of actual user concerns that would be anti AI like malware vector, slow performance, and data privacy which are 3 anti-AI arguments out of the top 5 overall user concerns.
Finally throw in a list of "stuff users like to do" which they currently do with websites and chat apps and declare they totally need new hardware to keep doing the same thing with AI.
This is typical propaganda masquerading as "research". Its an old scheme. Do you drink water to remain hydrated, like have you had a glass of water in the last month? Oh 99% of you have indeed drank a glass of water? Well thats just duckie I will now convert that survey data into... President Trump has been seen drinking a glass of water historically... Now start the centrally coordinated press release storm: Front Page News: "Recent polling data indicates 99% of Americans agree with President Trump on Environmental and Dietary Choices" Because 'drink water', LOL.
This is VERY dire news for the AI bubble if the only "good" news they can ship is utterly ridiculous propaganda. They're toast, the Titanic has struck the iceberg and is going down...
(Score: 5, Touché) by Spamalope on Wednesday March 04, @02:22PM
Gartner, reporting that the thing that happened last year will happen by two years from now.
Insightful genius right there.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday March 05, @12:25AM (1 child)
...think different. (Pun intended). They just released the cheapest Mac ever, starting below $500 in the edu store.
The specs are absolutely entry level: phone SoC and 8GB of RAM (*1). Looks like they're going after school kids & students to broaden their market share, hoping that these will spec out the insanely priced (*2) gear later in their life or a little less later, when the swap file has killed the soldered-in SSD.
I'd place bets that some kind of sub $1000 Neo will be available in 2028, next to Chromebooks, and RasPis. If the Windows world wants to disappear by then, I won't mourn it, but I fear it will also still be there.
The good thing about all this is that millions of loud students will call out resource hogging applications, hopefully forcing vendors to make somewhat more efficient software - and thereby keeping our current machinery in the game for much longer. :)
*1 my 14 year old 2012 RMBP had 16GB (quad Ivy Bridge, 512 SSD; well, it was the high-end choice at 2800€), and that has been declared "unsupported vintage" many years ago.
*2 good spec MPB16 M5Max today:7300€
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Thursday March 05, @04:03AM
Vendors do not care - they just tell anyone who complains to buy a new computer every time, no matter how many millions complain.
If the school is against education and is forcing the students to run such proprietary malware, the students will either have to suffer the software running as slow as cold molasses, or buy a new computer and suffer the software running slow.