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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, 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.