Global shipments of personal computers fell by about a fifth in the third quarter of 2026, in what analysts described as the industry's sharpest decline in more than three years.
IDC reported that shipments dropped 20.1 per cent year on year to 62.7 million units, against 78.5 million in the third quarter of 2025. The firm said it was the biggest third-quarter fall it had ever recorded, according to PCMag.
Omdia, measuring a slightly different set of devices, put the decline at 21.2 per cent, to 58.1 million laptops, desktops and workstations, and called it the sharpest drop since the first quarter of 2023. Desktop shipments, including desktop workstations, fell 23.5 per cent to 11.7 million units; laptops, including laptop workstations, fell 20.6 per cent to 46.4 million.
The quarter also broke the industry's usual seasonal pattern. Third-quarter shipments normally exceed the second quarter's; this year they were 9.1 per cent lower than the 68.2 million units shipped in the second quarter, according to IDC.
Larger falls have happened. Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC, told PCMag: "If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with larger declines, such as 2022 Q4, which was -28.2 percent, and 2023 Q1, which was -28.7 percent. Both were coming off pandemic highs."
The cause this time is in the components. Since 2025, demand for high-bandwidth memory and server DRAM for artificial intelligence workloads has absorbed manufacturing capacity that would otherwise go to consumer devices, among them PCs, smartphones and games consoles.
The effect shows up in the cost of building a machine. Memory and storage now account for nearly 40 per cent of the bill of materials for PC manufacturing, against a typical 15 per cent, according to Ben Yeh, principal analyst at Omdia.
IDC said many vendors and sales channels stocked up earlier in the year in anticipation of memory price rises, which left minimal demand to serve in the third quarter. "[Sales] channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand," Ubrani said.
He added that promotions might bring short-term relief for consumers, but that "prices will remain elevated", and that "with macro conditions worsening, the risk is that the outlook for the next few quarters gets worse before it gets better". IDC expects prices to fall "only modestly and briefly".
Omdia's research director Ishan Dutt said the quarter "comes as no surprise". He added: "The impact of upstream component cost increases has now fully worked its way through to end-market pricing, with consumers and IT decision-makers responding accordingly. On the supply side, vendors and their ODM partners began scaling back production in [Q3], while channel partners continued working through elevated inventory levels."
Omdia expects shipments to fall a further 24 per cent year on year next quarter, and 7 per cent across 2027. Executives at Micron and Samsung indicated last week that the component shortages could continue through 2028.
It is worth being precise about what the 40 per cent figure describes. It is not a complaint about memory. It is memory's share of the machine, measured in money, and it has risen from about 15 per cent to nearly 40 per cent in a quarter when the number of machines fell by a fifth.
On the industry's own accounting, then, the memory is winning. It is taking a larger share of a smaller object, which is the definition of a successful component. The other sixty per cent or so, being the processor, the screen, the keyboard and the case, is the part losing share, and on Omdia's figures it is also the part being shipped less.
Our analysts at the Department of Unnecessary Research therefore propose the obvious reclassification. If memory and storage are nearly 40 per cent of the bill of materials and rising, a PC is no longer a computer that contains memory. It is memory with a delivery mechanism attached, and the delivery mechanism is the part that has stopped selling.
The shortage is expected to run to 2028. The chips are still being bought; they are simply being bought by the artificial intelligence that the computers were going to be used to build. Omdia's forecast of a further 24 per cent fall is, on this reading, not a downturn but a handover.
Nobody has yet asked the memory whether it still requires the computer.