Global PC shipments fell 20.1% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2026, and IDC analysts now expect elevated pricing to persist through the end of 2027, compounding the procurement challenge facing enterprise IT departments.

Lenovo led the market with 14.9 million units shipped, down 22.6% from the same quarter a year earlier, securing a 23.8% share. HP placed second at 10.3 million units (-30.9% YoY, 16.5% share), followed by Dell with 7.6 million units (-25%) and Apple with 5.9 million units (-11.3%). Asus and other vendors accounted for the balance.

What is driving prices higher?

Memory and storage component costs continue to climb, with OEMs warning that the bill-of-materials mix will keep shifting against buyers. On HP's August earnings call, CFO Karen Parkhill said: "We continue to expect memory and storage costs to increase further as a percentage of the bill of materials." HP now prioritizes "higher-value unit placements, repricing for higher commodity costs" to offset declining volume, Parkhill added.

IDC's analysts wrote in their Q3 tracker release: "A weaker economy could soften demand further, and with prices still high and supply constrained, the outlook for the remainder of 2026 and going into 2027 could deteriorate."

Channel partners stocked up on inventory earlier in 2026 ahead of those hikes, then spent Q3 clearing that stock as demand dried up. "Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand," said Jitesh Ubrani, research director at IDC.

How are enterprises reacting?

Many buyers pulled refresh orders forward to beat price increases and have since paused. Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, said companies are extending their typical three-to-four-year PC upgrade window because most AI workloads still run in the cloud. "They have been spending big on infrastructure and cloud services to implement new AI solutions, which don't need the latest PC hardware," Gold said.

HP is tilting its product mix toward higher-priced configurations to defend revenue per unit. Within the existing channel inventory, low-cost PCs are already harder to source.

Where do AI PCs fit?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI PCs accounted for 40% of PC shipments at a recent event. HP disclosed that AI PCs made up 46% of its shipments in the fiscal quarter that ended July 31.

Vendor pitch lines now center on on-device AI. HP rolled out HP IQ, its own on-device AI software. Its systems also ship with Wolf Security's AI-based tool that guards against BIOS-level intrusion, according to Ketan Patel, president of personal systems at HP, on the August call.

Can agentic AI PCs reset demand?

Microsoft and OEMs are pushing a new class, dubbed "agentic AI PCs" or "Builder PCs," with local GPU horsepower to run high-end LLMs and cut cloud-based token costs. Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra and HP's ZBook Ultra G3a mobile workstation each list above $2,500.

Whether the category has been reinvented remains contested. Technalysis Research analyst Bob O'Donnell wrote in a research note that "whether that really means the category has been reinvented is still up for debate."

For cash-constrained IT departments, the practical question is whether on-device inference savings justify a per-seat premium of that magnitude, or whether cloud tokens remain the cheaper line item.