Q3 2026 Was Historically Bad For PC Shipments (pcmag.com) 47
PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year to 62.7 million units in the third quarter of 2026, the worst Q3 decline IDC has recorded. "The top three PC makers -- Lenovo, Dell, and HP -- also saw their shipments fall by over 20% year over year," reports PCMag. From the report: "If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with larger declines, such as 2022Q4, which was -28.2%, and 2023Q1, which was -28.7%. Both were coming off pandemic highs," IDC Director Jitesh Ubrani told PCMag in an email. The numbers aren't a great sign, since third-quarter PC shipments usually outpace those in the second quarter as vendors introduce new products ahead of the holiday shopping season. Instead, PC shipments were at 62.7 million units, down 9.1% from the previous quarter.
[...] Of course, the downturn isn't a surprise. IDC and other research firms have warned that the ongoing AI-driven memory shortage threatens to sap demand for PCs and phones due to soaring memory and storage costs. "What we're seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in. Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of [memory-related] price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2," Ubrani said in a report covering IDC's preliminary estimates for the quarter.
In one bright spot, Ubrani said vendors and retailers might cut prices to generate interest and clear out products they have in stock. "Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand. That could translate into promotions and some short-term relief for consumers, but we don't expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago. Prices will remain elevated," he added.
[...] Of course, the downturn isn't a surprise. IDC and other research firms have warned that the ongoing AI-driven memory shortage threatens to sap demand for PCs and phones due to soaring memory and storage costs. "What we're seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in. Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of [memory-related] price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2," Ubrani said in a report covering IDC's preliminary estimates for the quarter.
In one bright spot, Ubrani said vendors and retailers might cut prices to generate interest and clear out products they have in stock. "Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand. That could translate into promotions and some short-term relief for consumers, but we don't expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago. Prices will remain elevated," he added.
Obligatory Gif (Score:2)
[Will Smith going "Hmm"]
It's inevitable. (Score:1)
Re:It's inevitable. (Score:4, Interesting)
You and me brother. I am up for a shit-in anytime. I'll get some Indian food in and some prunes. We can Jackson Pollock our dissent.
You're All Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
You're all thinking; 'Yea serves them right for price gouging.' But, you'd be wrong.
You see Dell PC sales down 20%. But look at what Dell sees:
Q2 2027 (Reported July 2026)
Record revenue of $47.0 billion, up 58% year over year
Record diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $6.34, up 273% year over year, and record non-GAAP diluted EPS of $7.04, up 203%
Cash flow from operations of $2.2 billion
Full-year FY27 revenue guidance of $192.0 billion, up 69% year over year
Full-year FY27 EPS guidance of $24.37 and non-GAAP EPS guidance of $25.50, up 181% and 148% year over year, respectively
Best fucking quarter EVAR!!!!
Then they raised their forecast and the stock went ballistic.
https://investors.delltechnolo... [delltechnologies.com]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Speaking of Michael Dell, his wife appears to either be a skin walker or martian wearing a human suit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Jesus Christ. That is some Dark Crystal Skesis shit. She should donate some face skin to poor people with no face skin.
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Meh... she looks like an older woman that's trying too hard to look young instead of growing old gracefully.
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Is it just me or is it sick when Wikipedia doesn't even mention the singular thing people notice most about her, ostensibly in the name of political correctness? There's a way to write that section without violating their standards, but it isn't even there.
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Dell is making those numbers on the datacenter and enterprise sales side of the house. Those purchasers are going to buy what they need when they need it regardless of the uptick in pricing. The consumer market is a completely different animal. There is a lot more price sensitivity there and people will think long and hard about purchases, especially discretionary ones.
Could Dell subsidize consumer sales with that enterprise windfall? I suppose they could, but I suspect they won't or it will not cover a
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Do you think Dell exists to make or sell computers, consumer or commercial, or do you think that Dell exists to make money?
So long as earnings continue and increase, Dell could not care less if they never sold another consumer computer ever again. Hell, if they could beat their current numbers selling stuffed animals, they'd gladly be out of the computer business completely.
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Not making any value judgement at all. They are a public company. They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I'm sure someone has done the math on different scenarios about the cost benefit (or not) of subsidizing their consumer business using the commercial sales windfall they're seeing.
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Detroit got rid of sedans because they weren't making enough margin (note, not "weren't profitable," just not enough margin). If anyone thinks the likes of e.g. Dell are going to actively subsidize their client business from enterprise margins, I cannot imagine that they are native to this reality.
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Detroit got rid of sedans because they weren't making enough margin (note, not "weren't profitable," just not enough margin). If anyone thinks the likes of e.g. Dell are going to actively subsidize their client business from enterprise margins, I cannot imagine that they are native to this reality.
Detroit got rid of sedans because nobody bought them. They could be immensely profitable but it does not matter if they don't sell. That is not the problem with PCs.
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It is a change in the market. Is it a lasting one, is the question. It had become a volume buiness but it seems to be turning into more of boutique one, where a a smaller number with specific requirements spend a lot of money on custom build with some very high end parts out of shrinking batches. A lot of us here have a lot of gray hair or no hair at this point. We are still mentally thinking about the later 80s-2010s or so where you could spend roughly the same inflation adjusted dollars every 24 months
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Dell is making those numbers on the datacenter and enterprise sales side of the house. Those purchasers are going to buy what they need when they need it regardless of the uptick in pricing.
We're extending our lifecycles in an attempt to protect ourselves from the rising costs. It's turns out that while some people can absorb their infrastructure cost increasing by a factor of four, most people can't.
More recent guidance we have says that 2028 is going to be worse in terms of pricing than 2026 was. I'm not going to be surprised if, another five years from now, ten-year-old clients (not to mention servers, storage, switches) are the norm in a corporate environment rather than the exception.
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The valuation of these behemoth AI companies and the infrastructure that is along for the ride to sell them shovels is completely unsustainable. It's not a matter of IF there is a significant price correction, just when.
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You see Dell PC sales down 20%.
You're cherry picking. Dell is one of a small subset of the PC market that is not dependent on consumer PC sales, and they are very much making a nice mint on the AI craze, especially with their server and datacentre offerings.
Meanwhile there are countless consumer PC oriented companies out there that are truly struggling.
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You're cherry picking.
I don't think that I cherry picked anything.
The article summary cited the top three PC manufacturers in the World. Dell is the top revenue(sales) company of them all. By far.
I used the number one example from the article to demonstrate that, while people here and in general will jump up and down saying that the vendor price gouging is eroding their sales and thus they deserve their lost revenue, the reality is that the top dogs have never done better and don't give a flying fuck about lost consumer sales. T
Big Shock there! (Score:2)
I'm stunned! I mean, who doesn't want to pay 25% more for their new desktop or laptop than they did around this time last year because of the huge price jumps for memory and storage?
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The AI fanboys still seem to be buying, money is no object.
I did some price checking a couple weeks ago and you can still assemble a non-AI capable AM4 system mini ATX system for about $800. I did not include the video card in that list as I'm not a gamer, AMD's APU integrated graphics are good enough for me. I currently use a 4600G.
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It will be interesting to see what happens when this AI valuation house of cards deflates and blunts the hoovering up of critical supply items for consumer goods. That's likely to leave a lot of middle-men who bought at the peak sitting on significant losses when prices ultimately correct.
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You have more certainty about the future than I do. I *do* doubt that the full projected build-out will ever happen, and that will definitely hurt some overcommitted people. It *might* crash thoroughly, but I see no reason to put that at higher than a 10% chance. More likely a bunch of planned construction never gets ordered. And *when* does that happen? This year? Next April 15th?
Yeah, it will crash, just like the internet build-out crashed. Some folks will get hurt. But it won't return to what it
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That's the thing... current AI models don't seem to push back on bad assumptions. If you tell it "Plan for 1000% growth over the next 18 months and order hardware to scale", it will just say "sure thing boss!" and spit out a hardware order. It will likely not even bother to say something like "Are you sure you REALLY need this much hardware"?
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Disagree. A large part of why costs are through the roof is that the product mix has shifted from heavily favoring general use parts like SDRAM to more specialized parts like HBM. Most of this production is going right to the end customer rather than middlemen. What you're likely to see when/if this bubble pops is a lot of nominally useless (in the short term) hardware (for general compute) being liquidated and that what middlemen are sitting on is still supply constrained for the immediate future and hol
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I helped clean up a 2021 laptop yesterday that had 32 gigs of RAM with a half TB of storage.
It was a standard-issue company laptop at the time.
Can you imagine paying more for an 8 gig machine today?
It may be the new normal but people without an urgent need are waiting to see if the bubble pops.
There doesn't seem to be a free market road to profitability without a significant resource breakthrough so maybe they're right.
Volumes, but what about revenue? (Score:2)
Everyone knows that pretty much by definition volumes are low, that's the whole definition of a shortage.
The vendors may still be happy, perhaps even happier if the sky high prices produce at least as much revenue at high margin.
Does Windows 11 still run on PCs (Score:2)
Owing to the October 2025 Windows 10 phase-out/scare/scolding, I purchased a refurb Dell Micro for cheap that came with Windows 11 Pro. 16 G RAM, 1 T SSD, what was there to not like.
Come March 2026, Windows Update was slowing this machine to a crawl, especially if I booted it every other week because it was my PC separate from work that I paid bills on.
Consulting with Copilot AI (natch, you would think Copilot is savy about Microsoft products), it turns out that my cheap PC has a SATA SSD, not an NVMe
Re:Does Windows 11 still run on PCs (Score:4, Informative)
It's highly unlikely that anything you'd do in the course of normal desktop use would make much of a subjective difference from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive. Most sustained IO operations don't take so long that you'll realize the difference. I can tell when I'm copying 30GB files from my camera card or doing full database dumps, but for just loading up a game or booting an OS? They're subjectively almost exactly the same experience.
That being said, there is such a thing as a cacheless drive. SSDs used to have a certain amount of DRAM or SLC NAND as a faster intermediary interface for storage. Low-cost drives might not have THAT, and that seriously reduces the utility of the SSD in the first place, especially on no-name drives. Those guys are sometimes no better than mechanical drives. Since your system is a refurb, it's possible they did just stick a POS drive in.
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1) Open task manager and see if any program is thrashing the drive
2) Run a SMART test to make sure its not silently failing
3) Don't listen to Copilot for hardware troubleshooting
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I ran tests on the drive, and what Task Manager shows to be thrashing the drive is what Copilot tells me is involved in processing Windows Update.
Given enought time, the system quiets down, the drive light goes dark, and the system runs fine. The claim is that Windows changed their way of doing updates that it isn't the raw drive throughput as much as the fine-grained using the SSD as RAM that is going on.
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Come March 2026, Windows Update was slowing this machine to a crawl
Something is broken on your machine. There was no appreciable difference in resource use or efficiency of the 1H2026 update. It was a feature update of virtually zero significance. Time to do a PC reset. A SATA SSD has zero to do with a Windows update slowing down anything.
On the flip side 1H2026 actually noted a very significant decrease in system resource allocation (RAM usage) compared the previous 2-3 years, so if your PC ran Windows 11 fine at anytime in that period it should now run better than ever b
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Copilot (yes, the A.I.) guided me through running Crystal Info, and true to form of a refurb machine, it has a Patriot 220 1 T SATA drive, the cheapest and slowest possible drive on the market, even for a SATA drive.
The Crystal Info SMART test shows the drive is healthy with only about 8% of its life used up in write cycles in where ever the refurb place got its drives from.
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The slow to a crawl is starting it up after a couple of missed Update Tuesdays, and if I wait long enough, the system settles down and runs just fine. It is just when I turn it on after being off for two weeks, the boot is sllooowwww!
What this has to do with TFA is I cheaped out on a Windows 11 replacement computer and this is what I am getting.
Lift the tariffs (Score:2)
Lift the tariffs you morons.
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It's not the tariffs, it's the people generating funny cat videos all day.
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The party that controls all 3 branches of government could have a vote tomorrow and take those powers away. But they're all boot lickers and cult members without a spine.
prices vs volume (Score:2)
Well, sales volume is down less than prices are up. Prices are at least double since the beginning of the year. Certain component prices are several times their cost from just a few short months ago.
Plus inflation, everything is super expensive, no room to pay double for a new PC right now.
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Yes. In 2023 I was paying $500 for 8TB SSDs. Last week I paid $900 for a 4TB SSD and it doesn't even have DRAM.
So we have a double hit because lots of PC purchases were brought forward last year by Windows 11 refusing to run on perfectly good computers and the price of many components has doubled since then. I wouldn't have replaced my laptop if the old one wasn't literally falling apart.
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Yeah, PC sales were artificially high in 2025 because of the Windows 11 requirements, now prices have rocketed so sales are artificially low. The next step is presumably when the AI companies - and their investors - realise that they are not going to make a profit on all those tokens and some go belly-up. The Chinese are also going to be making more RAM and SSDs for their own market to avoid sanctions, prices are going to have to drop.
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"This just in, basic economics discovered" (Score:2)
I'm shocked! (Score:2)
It's a shocking revelation that when people are choosing between fuel, medication, and food for where their money goes that they might not be looking to buy a ridiculously priced PC because the RAM is more expensive than the CPU.
Greedy fuckers are greedy, so eat the meal you cooked.
Wrong take. (Score:5, Insightful)
The story isn't that sales have fallen 20%. It's that 80% of the demand still exists.
What we've really taught these companies is that they've traditionally undervalued their products, and if component prices return to "normal" there is no reason at all that retail prices need to track it. The supply side has all the power, and they know it now.
The new normal sucks.
Literally (Score:1)
bleed the population dry, jack up all the prices and then give all the ram to AI, and then be surprised people stop buying stuff - priceless