Laptop Sales Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Alex Rivera | Last updated: August 2, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Global laptop shipments are falling and laptop revenue is rising at the same time. Axis Intelligence Research estimates 48.5 million notebooks shipped worldwide in Q2 2026, inside a traditional PC market that contracted 4.9% to 68.2 million units. The cause is not weak demand. It is the price of memory.
Quick Answer
Worldwide traditional PC shipments fell 4.9% year over year to 68.2 million units in Q2 2026, the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth, according to IDC. Axis Intelligence Research estimates notebooks accounted for 48.5 million of that total. IDC forecasts full-year 2026 PC shipments down 11.3% while average selling prices rise 18.3%.
Key Findings
- According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, worldwide traditional PC shipments fell 4.9% year over year to 68.2 million units in Q2 2026.
- Axis Intelligence Research estimates worldwide notebook shipments reached 48.5 million units in Q2 2026, within a range of 47.6 million to 49.3 million.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, notebooks represented 72.31% of combined notebook and desktop shipments in Q1 2026, the highest quarterly reading in the five quarters of IDC tracker data reviewed.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates a Price-Volume Divergence of 20.0 points for HP Inc’s Personal Systems business in its April 2026 quarter, where revenue grew 13% while units fell 7%.
- According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index for computers and peripherals rose 4.97% between December 2025 and June 2026, reversing part of a 96.84% decline recorded since December 1997.
How Many Laptops Are Sold Each Year?
The honest answer is that nobody publishes a clean global laptop unit number every quarter, and most sites that claim to are quoting a PC total and calling it laptops. The two are not the same thing.
IDC counts traditional PCs as desktops, notebooks, and workstations, excluding tablets and x86 servers. That total came to 68.2 million units in Q2 2026, down 4.9% year over year from 71.7 million in Q2 2025. It was the first year-over-year decline after nine straight quarters of growth.
The notebook slice sits one level down, in IDC’s Personal Computing Device tracker table, which reports notebooks, desktops, detachable tablets, slate tablets, and workstations as separate lines. Those are the numbers that let you talk about laptops specifically rather than PCs generally.
Worldwide Notebook Shipments by Quarter
| Quarter | Notebook units | Desktop units | Notebook share of the two | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 45,517,747 | 18,472,961 | 71.13% | IDC tracker table; share calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Q2 2025 | 50,258,650 | 19,485,533 | 72.06% | IDC tracker table; share calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Q3 2025 | 54,172,700 | 22,333,859 | 70.81% | IDC tracker table; share calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Q4 2025 | 54,929,150 | 23,350,150 | 70.17% | IDC tracker table; share calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Q1 2026 | 47,432,504 | 18,165,336 | 72.31% | IDC tracker table; share calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, market page updated June 8, 2026. Share column is an Axis Intelligence Research calculation, formula disclosed in the Methodology section.
Notebook shipments in Q1 2026 were up 4.21% against Q1 2025 and down 13.65% against the Q4 2025 holiday quarter. Both of those movements are ordinary. What is not ordinary is what happened next.
IDC has not published a notebook-only figure for Q2 2026. Axis Intelligence Research estimates the number at 48.5 million units, using the Q1 2026 notebook share applied to the published Q2 total, with a stated range of 47.6 million to 49.3 million depending on how workstations are treated. The estimate is labeled an estimate for a reason, and the arithmetic is in the Methodology section rather than hidden behind a rounded headline.
Alex Rivera: The number that matters to a buyer is not the shipment count, it is what the shipment count is doing to the shelf. Fewer units moving through the channel at higher prices means the mid-range refresh you were planning in September is a different purchase than the one you priced in January. Attach rates on memory upgrades are where this bites first, because that is the configuration option vendors can no longer afford to discount.
Why Are Laptop Prices Rising in 2026?
Because DRAM is going into AI servers instead of laptops, and laptop makers are competing for what is left.
Gartner projects a 130% surge in combined DRAM and solid-state drive prices by the end of 2026 against 2025 levels, which the firm expects to push PC prices up 17%. Memory is forecast to peak at 23% of a PC’s total bill of materials, up from 16% in 2025. That seven-point shift is the whole story. A component that was a sixth of the build cost becomes closer to a quarter, and there is no margin left to absorb it on a cheap machine.
Gartner’s analyst Ranjit Atwal draws the conclusion plainly: the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment is expected to disappear by 2028. The same forecast pushes 50% AI PC market penetration out to 2028 as well, because the machines that carry a neural processing unit also carry the memory configurations that got expensive.
IDC’s numbers point the same direction from a different starting position. IDC forecasts full-year 2026 PC shipments down 11.3% with average selling prices up 18.3%, and expects no meaningful relief from the memory shortage before the end of 2027.
This is where the laptop market connects to a story Axis Intelligence Research has been tracking on the other side of the supply chain. The memory that laptop makers cannot buy affordably is being consumed by the same buildout documented in our AI data center statistics and AI data center energy consumption statistics research. Consumer hardware and hyperscale infrastructure are bidding for the same wafers, and the consumer side is losing.
What Is the Axis Price-Volume Divergence?
Unit counts alone now understate the laptop market, because the market is shrinking in units and growing in dollars. Axis Intelligence Research built the Price-Volume Divergence to measure that gap directly.
Formula (Axis Price-Volume Divergence, v1.0):
PVD = revenue growth rate (%) minus unit shipment growth rate (%), expressed in percentage points, for the same entity over the same period.
A PVD near zero means a business is growing by selling more things. A large positive PVD means it is growing by charging more for fewer things. The inputs are all from filed or published documents, listed row by row in the dataset.
Axis Price-Volume Divergence, Q2 2026
| Entity | Period | Revenue growth | Unit growth | PVD (points) | Source of inputs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP Inc, Personal Systems | Quarter ended Apr 30, 2026 | +13.0% | -7.0% | +20.0 | HP Inc. fiscal Q2 2026 results |
| Apple, Mac | Quarter ended Jun 27, 2026 | +28.7% | +10.1% | +18.6 | Apple fiscal Q3 2026 results; IDC unit growth |
| Worldwide traditional PC (full-year forecast) | Calendar 2026 | +18.3% ASP | -11.3% | +29.6 | IDC PCD forecast |
Source: HP Inc. and Apple Inc. quarterly results; IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. PVD calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
HP’s fiscal 2026 second quarter results state Personal Systems net revenue of $10.2 billion, up 13% year over year, with total units down 7%, consumer units down 8%, and commercial units down 7%. Running those two rates against each other gives an implied revenue per unit increase of 21.5%. HP also reported that AI-capable PCs made up 44% of its shipment mix in the quarter, which is part of why the average machine leaving the factory costs more.
Apple’s fiscal 2026 third quarter results report Mac net sales of $10.352 billion against $8.046 billion a year earlier, a 28.7% increase. IDC put Apple’s Q2 2026 unit shipments at 6.7 million against 6.1 million, growth of 10.1%.
Combining those two sources gives a figure neither publishes on its own. According to Axis Intelligence Research, Apple’s implied revenue per Mac reached $1,545 in the June 2026 quarter, up from $1,319 a year earlier, an increase of 17.1%.
Inputs: $10,352,000,000 divided by 6,700,000 units = $1,545. $8,046,000,000 divided by 6,100,000 units = $1,319. Limitation: IDC publishes shipment counts rounded to one decimal place in millions, and IDC’s own stated growth rate of 10.1% is computed on unrounded data. Using IDC’s stated rate instead of the rounded counts yields 16.9% rather than 17.1%. Apple’s Mac category is net sales recognized under its revenue policy, while IDC counts sell-in to channels and end users. The ratio is an implied revenue per unit, not a retail average selling price, and it includes desktop Macs.
Alex Rivera: Two vendors, two different accounting calendars, two different product mixes, and the same answer within two points of each other. That convergence is the finding. When a premium brand and a volume brand both land near a 20-point divergence in the same six months, the driver is not brand strategy, it is the bill of materials. Anyone modeling a 2027 refresh budget on 2025 price-per-seat is going to miss.
Which Companies Sell the Most Laptops?
The vendor ranking did not move in Q2 2026, but the composition underneath it did.
Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Traditional PC Shipments, Q2 2026
| Rank | Vendor | Q2 2026 units (M) | Q2 2026 share | Q2 2025 units (M) | Q2 2025 share | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lenovo | 16.6 | 24.4% | 17.0 | 23.7% | -2.1% | IDC |
| 2 | HP Inc | 13.0 | 19.1% | 14.3 | 19.9% | -9.0% | IDC |
| 3 | Dell Technologies | 9.3 | 13.6% | 9.8 | 13.6% | -5.0% | IDC |
| 4 | Apple | 6.7 | 9.9% | 6.1 | 8.5% | +10.1% | IDC |
| 5 | ASUS | 5.0 | 7.4% | 5.0 | 7.0% | +0.2% | IDC |
| – | Others | 17.5 | 25.7% | 19.6 | 27.3% | -10.5% | IDC |
| – | Total | 68.2 | 100.0% | 71.7 | 100.0% | -4.9% | IDC |
Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, July 8, 2026 preliminary results.
Apple was the only top-five vendor with meaningful growth, and IDC attributes the share gain to the MacBook Neo launch, noting that Apple raised prices in line with the rest of the market and still gained ground.
The more durable movement is at the bottom of the table. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the top five vendors held 74.2% of worldwide traditional PC shipments in Q2 2026, up from 72.8% in Q2 2025, while the “Others” category fell 10.5% year over year. That is roughly double the market’s overall rate of decline. IDC’s Jean Philippe Bouchard makes the mechanism explicit: the largest vendors have the buying power and supplier relationships to secure memory, and smaller rivals do not.
Alex Rivera: Consolidation during a shortage is not a surprise, but the direction of it is worth naming. Buyers who have relied on second-tier brands for price-competitive fleet purchases are going to find fewer options at the same spec, and the boutique gaming and workstation builders who buy memory on the spot market are the most exposed. Sell-through data over the next two quarters will show whether channel inventory at these prices actually clears.
How Much Does a Laptop Cost in 2026?
Two U.S. federal price series answer this from opposite ends of the transaction, and together they show something the forecasts alone cannot: the reversal has already started, and it is visible in official data.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks consumer prices for computers in CPI series CUUR0000SEEE01. The index is quality adjusted, meaning it accounts for the fact that a $900 laptop in 2026 is a far more capable machine than a $900 laptop in 2006. On that basis the index fell 96.84% between December 1997 and June 2026. Computers got cheaper for nearly three decades, without interruption worth naming.
Then it turned. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the index rose 4.97% between December 2025 and June 2026, moving from 33.730 to 35.406.
U.S. Computer and Laptop Price Indexes, 2025 to 2026
| Month | CPI, computers and peripherals (Dec 2007 = 100) | PPI, portable computers and laptops (Feb 2023 = 100) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | 33.942 | 95.802 | BLS |
| Jun 2025 | 35.685 | 97.178 | BLS |
| Dec 2025 | 33.730 | 97.134 | BLS |
| Feb 2026 | 34.782 | 97.100 | BLS |
| Mar 2026 | 35.293 | 97.435 | BLS |
| Apr 2026 | 35.601 | 98.135 | BLS |
| May 2026 | 35.662 | 98.197 | BLS |
| Jun 2026 | 35.406 | not yet published | BLS |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CUUR0000SEEE01 and PCU33411133411172, retrieved via FRED on August 2, 2026. Both series are not seasonally adjusted.
The producer side is narrower and more specific to this article’s subject. BLS PPI series PCU33411133411172 covers portable computers, laptops, tablets, and other single-user computers at the factory gate. It bottomed at 95.293 in August 2024 and reached 98.197 in May 2026, a rise of 3.05% that Axis Intelligence Research calculates from the published series. Year over year the May 2026 reading was 1.02% above May 2025.
Here Axis Intelligence Research disagrees with the simplest reading of the headlines. Gartner’s 17% and IDC’s 18.3% are forecasts of what 2026 will look like in full, and the federal price data through mid-2026 is nowhere near those levels yet. The producer index is up about one point year over year, not seventeen. Either the increases arrive very heavily in the second half, consistent with IDC’s expectation that Q4 declines could reach 20%, or the full-year figures come in below forecast. Both outcomes are live. Anyone citing a 17% laptop price increase as a present-tense fact in August 2026 is citing a projection as an observation.
What Share of PCs Are Laptops?
Axis Intelligence Research publishes the Notebook Share Index to answer this consistently rather than by anecdote.
Formula (Axis Notebook Share Index, v1.0):
NSI = notebook shipments divided by (notebook shipments + desktop shipments), expressed as a percentage, using IDC’s Personal Computing Device tracker table. Workstations are reported separately in that table and are excluded from both numerator and denominator.
The index read 72.31% for Q1 2026, the highest of the five quarters in the current tracker table, and it has held between 70.17% and 72.31% across that span. Applied to IDC’s published forecast table, the index runs 71.16% in 2026 and 72.91% in 2030.
Axis Notebook Share Index, Forecast Basis
| Year | Notebook units (forecast) | Desktop units (forecast) | NSI | Source of inputs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 181,334,313 | 73,486,598 | 71.16% | IDC PCD forecast table |
| 2027 | 181,556,222 | 73,590,381 | 71.16% | IDC PCD forecast table |
| 2028 | 189,687,057 | 74,812,666 | 71.72% | IDC PCD forecast table |
| 2029 | 196,871,167 | 75,158,364 | 72.37% | IDC PCD forecast table |
| 2030 | 207,626,700 | 77,150,384 | 72.91% | IDC PCD forecast table |
Source: IDC PCD forecast table. Index calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
The share moves slowly, which is the point of tracking it. Roughly seven in ten personal computers shipped worldwide are laptops, and that ratio drifts upward by about half a point every two years rather than lurching.
Do IDC and Gartner Agree on Laptop Sales?
No, and the gap is large enough that it changes conclusions.
For Q1 2026, IDC reported 65.6 million traditional PCs shipped worldwide, up 3% year over year. Gartner reported 62.8 million units, up 4%. Axis Intelligence Research puts that spread at 2.8 million units, or 4.3% of Gartner’s base, for the same three months.
Omdia, a third tracker, reported worldwide desktop, notebook, and workstation shipments of 65.7 million in Q2 2026, a decline of 3.6%, against IDC’s 68.2 million and 4.9% for the same quarter. Omdia’s figure is reported here as plain text rather than as a linked primary source, because Axis Intelligence Research reviewed it through secondary coverage rather than an Omdia release.
The trackers differ on category definitions, on whether Chromebooks and certain white-box builds are counted, and on how channel sell-in is estimated in markets without direct reporting. None of them is wrong. The practical rule is to never mix figures from two trackers inside one growth calculation, which is exactly the error that produces the impossible laptop statistics that circulate every quarter.
Gartner’s Rishi Padhi added a caution about Q1 2026 that survives into the second half: the 4% growth was inflated by inventory building ahead of expected price rises rather than by real demand, in a quarter that was already compared against a 2025 base inflated by tariff front-loading. Two layers of pull-forward stacked on each other.
How Is the AI Boom Changing What Laptop Buyers Get?
The AI PC and the memory shortage are the same phenomenon viewed from the marketing side and the cost side.
HP reported AI-capable machines at 44% of its quarterly shipment mix and expects that to reach 60% to 70% in the next fiscal year. Gartner, meanwhile, has pushed its expectation of 50% AI PC market penetration out to 2028, on the grounds that rising prices delay it. Those two statements are not in conflict. Vendor mix measures what is being shipped; market penetration measures what is installed and in use, and the second lags the first by years.
What sits underneath both is memory. The neural processing unit is not what makes an AI PC expensive. The RAM configuration it needs is, and that RAM is the same component being consumed by the infrastructure buildout Axis Intelligence Research tracks in AI statistics and in our data center electricity cost by state analysis. The pattern also mirrors what we documented in smartphone statistics, where Gartner expects the same memory shock to cut shipments 8.4% and raise prices 13%.
Alex Rivera: The upgrade-worthiness verdict for 2026 comes out differently than it has in years. If your machine is three years old and working, the case for waiting is stronger than the case for buying, and it is stronger than it was in 2024. Gartner already expects device lifetimes to stretch 15% for business buyers and 20% for consumers by the end of the year. The exception is anyone who needs 32GB or more, where the configuration premium is climbing faster than the base price and waiting costs more than buying.
Laptop Sales Forecast: What Happens Through 2030?
IDC’s forecast table puts notebook shipments at 181.3 million units in 2026 and 207.6 million in 2030. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that as a compound annual growth rate of 3.44% across those four years. The total personal computing device market, PCs plus tablets, is forecast at 401.9 million units in 2026, down 10.4% year over year.
The revenue picture points the other way, which is the central tension of this market.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, applying IDC’s own full-year 2026 forecasts of an 11.3% unit decline and an 18.3% ASP increase implies worldwide traditional PC revenue growth of 4.9% for the year.
Inputs: (1 – 0.113) x (1 + 0.183) – 1 = 0.049. Limitation: This treats IDC’s ASP forecast as applying uniformly across the shipment base. Mix shift toward premium and AI-capable machines means part of the ASP increase reflects what is being sold rather than price increases on identical configurations, so the figure describes revenue direction rather than a like-for-like price change. It is an estimate derived from two forecasts, not an observed result.
A market where units fall by a ninth and revenue still rises by a twentieth is a market being reshaped by cost, not by demand. IDC’s Jitesh Ubrani framed it as a disconnect between units and dollars, with vendors pushing price increases through faster than demand is dropping.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this article was retrieved from a primary source document during the production session on August 2, 2026, and logged with its URL and retrieval date in the accompanying dataset. No figure was carried over from prior work or from model memory. Where a source publishes rounded values, the rounded value is reproduced rather than a reconstructed precise one.
Sources used. IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker (Q2 2026 press release of July 8, 2026, and the PCD market page updated June 8, 2026); Gartner press releases of February 26, 2026, April 10, 2026, and January 20, 2026; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI series CUUR0000SEEE01 and PPI series PCU33411133411172, both retrieved via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED database; Apple Inc. fiscal 2026 third quarter results; HP Inc. fiscal 2026 second quarter results.
Axis Notebook Share Index v1.0. NSI = notebook shipments / (notebook shipments + desktop shipments) x 100. Inputs are IDC tracker table values. Workstations appear as a separate column in that table and are excluded from both numerator and denominator. Note a reconciliation issue disclosed in full: IDC’s Q1 2026 notebook and desktop columns sum to 65,597,840, which matches IDC’s published 65.6 million traditional PC total for that quarter, even though IDC’s stated definition of traditional PCs includes workstations. Axis Intelligence Research has not resolved this and does not paper over it. The index is therefore defined strictly on the notebook-plus-desktop base so that its denominator is unambiguous regardless of how the workstation column is treated upstream.
Axis Q2 2026 notebook shipment estimate v1.0. Upper bound = 68,200,000 x 72.31% = 49.3 million, applying the Q1 2026 notebook share to IDC’s published Q2 total. Lower bound = (68,200,000 – 2,300,000) x 72.31% = 47.6 million, subtracting a workstation run-rate consistent with the Q1 2026 tracker figure of 2,297,419 before applying the share. Midpoint = 48.5 million. This is an estimate, not an observation. It assumes the notebook mix held steady quarter over quarter, an assumption that could break if the memory shortage hit entry-level notebooks harder than desktops.
Axis Price-Volume Divergence v1.0. PVD = revenue growth rate minus unit shipment growth rate, in percentage points, for one entity over one period. Vendor rows combine a company-reported revenue growth rate with a unit growth rate from the same company where available (HP) or from IDC where the company does not report units (Apple). Combining a company revenue figure with a third-party unit figure introduces methodological mismatch, disclosed inline at the point of calculation.
Axis Implied Revenue per Unit v1.0. Reported segment revenue divided by shipment count for the same period. Fiscal calendars are aligned to the nearest calendar quarter and the mismatch is stated: Apple’s fiscal Q3 2026 ended June 27, 2026, and HP’s fiscal Q2 2026 ended April 30, 2026, so the HP row does not cover the same three months as IDC’s calendar Q2.
Limitations. Shipment data is sell-in, counting units delivered to distributors, retailers, and direct end customers, and does not equal units sold to consumers in the same period. Preliminary quarterly figures are revised. IDC’s tracker table restates prior quarters and those restated values differ modestly from the same quarters as originally announced in press releases, which is why share calculations in this article use tracker table values throughout rather than mixing the two vintages. BLS price indexes are quality adjusted and U.S. only; they do not represent a global average retail price and cannot be converted into one. No Axis Intelligence Research staff performed hands-on testing of any laptop for this article, and no first-person testing claim appears in it. This is a documentation-based and data-based analysis, which is stated here so that anyone citing it knows exactly what they are citing.
About This Dataset
The dataset accompanying this article contains 131 rows across 15 columns, covering worldwide notebook and desktop shipments by quarter, vendor shipments and market share, forecast shipment volumes through 2030, U.S. consumer and producer price indexes for computers and laptops, vendor segment revenue, and every Axis-calculated metric with its formula recorded in the method_note column. Each row carries its source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, whether the source is primary, and whether the value was calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
License: CC BY 4.0. The dataset may be reused, redistributed, and built upon, including commercially, with attribution.
Citation format: Axis Intelligence Research, Laptop Sales Statistics 2026, 2026.
Update policy is relevance driven rather than scheduled. The dataset and article will be revised when IDC publishes Q3 2026 preliminary results, when BLS releases CPI or PPI data that changes the direction of the price series, when IDC or Gartner materially revises the full-year 2026 forecast, or when a top-five vendor reports quarterly results that change a Price-Volume Divergence reading.
Distribution: Hugging Face, Kaggle, and GitHub, under the same CC BY 4.0 terms.
How to Cite This Page
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Laptop sales statistics 2026: Shipments, prices, and market share. https://axis-intelligence.com/laptop-sales-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Laptop Sales Statistics 2026: Shipments, Prices, and Market Share.” Axis Intelligence, 2 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/laptop-sales-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Laptop Sales Statistics 2026: Shipments, Prices, and Market Share.” Axis Intelligence, August 2, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/laptop-sales-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many laptops are sold worldwide each year?
IDC forecasts 181.3 million notebook units worldwide in 2026, rising to 207.6 million by 2030. For the most recent completed quarter, Axis Intelligence Research estimates 48.5 million notebooks shipped in Q2 2026, within a range of 47.6 million to 49.3 million.
Are laptop sales going up or down in 2026?
Down in units, up in revenue. IDC recorded a 4.9% year-over-year decline in traditional PC shipments in Q2 2026 and forecasts an 11.3% decline for the full year, while forecasting average selling prices up 18.3%.
Why are laptops more expensive in 2026?
A shortage of DRAM and NAND flash memory, driven largely by AI data center demand. Gartner projects combined DRAM and SSD prices up 130% by the end of 2026 and expects memory to reach 23% of a PC’s bill of materials, up from 16% in 2025.
Which brand sells the most laptops?
Lenovo led worldwide traditional PC shipments in Q2 2026 with 16.6 million units and 24.4% market share, ahead of HP Inc at 19.1% and Dell Technologies at 13.6%, according to IDC.
What percentage of computers sold are laptops?
Notebooks accounted for 72.31% of combined notebook and desktop shipments in Q1 2026, according to the Axis Notebook Share Index. The reading has stayed between 70.17% and 72.31% across the five quarters of IDC tracker data reviewed.
Will laptop prices go down in 2027?
IDC does not expect meaningful relief from the memory shortage before the end of 2027 and states that pricing is unlikely to return to 2025 levels even once memory capacity expands. Gartner expects device lifetimes to lengthen 15% for business buyers and 20% for consumers as a result.
How much have laptop prices actually risen so far?
Less than the forecasts, as of the most recent official data. The BLS producer price index for portable computers and laptops was 1.02% above its year-earlier level in May 2026, and the consumer price index for computers and peripherals rose 4.97% between December 2025 and June 2026.
Do IDC and Gartner report the same laptop sales numbers?
No. For Q1 2026, IDC reported 65.6 million traditional PC units and Gartner reported 62.8 million, a spread of 2.8 million units or 4.3% of Gartner’s base. The trackers use different category definitions and estimation methods, and their figures should never be combined inside a single growth calculation.
Is the cheap laptop segment disappearing?
Gartner projects that the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028, because memory costs remove the vendor margin that made low-priced machines viable.
What is an AI PC and are they selling?
An AI PC carries dedicated silicon for on-device machine learning inference, with the definition set by each vendor rather than by a standards body. HP reported AI-capable machines at 44% of its shipment mix in its April 2026 quarter and expects 60% to 70% in the next fiscal year, while Gartner has delayed its projection of 50% installed-base penetration to 2028.
By Axis Intelligence Research and Alex Rivera, Axis Intelligence Research Consumer Technology Analyst
For citation inquiries, dataset licensing, or to report a data error: [email protected]
See also: Smartphone Statistics – AI Data Center Statistics – Foldable Phone Statistics