Laptop Market Statistics 2026

2025 was the best year for PC shipments in over a decade, up 8.1% globally per IDC, the strongest growth the industry had seen since before the pandemic. Then, in the second quarter of 2026, shipments actually fell, the first quarterly decline after nine straight quarters of growth.

Both of those things are true, and they’re not really a contradiction, they’re two different forces hitting the same industry back to back. One was a real, predictable refresh cycle. The other was a genuine supply shock nobody buying a laptop right now can avoid paying for.

Here’s what actually happened to the laptop market, with real numbers from the two trackers that actually measure this industry, and why your next laptop is likely to cost more than it would have a year ago.

IDC, Omdia, Lenovo Group fiscal 2025 to 26 results. Checked August 2026.

The Best PC Year in a Decade, By Two Different Counts

IDC and Gartner are the two trackers that actually measure this industry, and even they land on meaningfully different numbers, a real, known methodology gap rather than either one being wrong.

IDC and Gartner full year 2025 press releases, published January 2026. IDC’s higher unit count reflects its broader category definitions, including more workstations and Chromebooks.

Both trackers agree this was the strongest single year of growth in over a decade, and both attribute it to the same root cause: Windows 10 reaching end of support forced a real, unavoidable replacement cycle across millions of machines that could no longer receive security updates.

Windows 10’s End of Support Actually Moved the Market

This isn’t a vague “upgrade cycle” story, it’s a specific, dated event with measurable before and after numbers.

StatCounter, Microsoft, IDC. Checked August 2026.

Who’s Actually Winning, Globally and in India

Lenovo closed its fiscal year, ended March 2026, with full year global PC market share of 24.9%, a calendar year record, and briefly exceeded 25% share in a single quarter, something no PC vendor had ever done before, per Lenovo’s own results.

Gartner Q4 2025 global rankings, IDC Q1 2026 India rankings. Checked August 2026. India’s ranking is genuinely different from the global one, not just a smaller version of it.

India’s PC market surged 31.1% year over year in Q1 2026 to 4.4 million units, per IDC, partly driven by a large Tamil Nadu state education tender, a real, one time factor most global coverage of “India’s PC boom” leaves out entirely.

Gartner, Q4 2025 global PC vendor rankings. Checked August 2026.

“AI PCs” Are Growing Fast, But Nobody Agrees on How Fast

PCs with dedicated on device AI hardware, an NPU capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second under Microsoft’s own Copilot+ standard, are the industry’s other major 2025 to 2026 story, and every tracker that measures this segment lands on a different number.

Each firm’s own most recently published figures, checked August 2026. Definitions of “AI PC” vary slightly by tracker, which explains part of the spread.

What every tracker agrees on despite the spread: AI capable hardware went from a niche feature to roughly a third or more of all PCs shipped in barely two years, and every major forecast expects it to cross the halfway point of the entire market sometime in 2026.

Canalys specifically measured the starting point of this shift precisely: AI capable PC shipments went from roughly 48 million units, an 18% share, in 2024, to a forecast surpassing 100 million units, close to 40% share, in 2025 alone. That’s a more than doubling of unit volume in a single year for a hardware category that barely existed at meaningful scale two years earlier.

The Real Reason Laptops Are About to Cost More

Somewhere between “Windows 10 refresh boom” and “record India shipments,” a genuinely disruptive memory chip shortage hit the entire industry, and it’s the direct explanation for Q2 2026’s shipment decline.

TrendForce has already cut its 2026 global notebook production forecast to a 2.4% contraction, a real reversal from its prior forecast of 1.7% growth, directly citing memory costs as the cause. Industry press synthesizing TrendForce’s data estimates notebook retail prices could rise 5 to 15% as manufacturers pass the increased cost through to buyers.

Omdia’s India specific forecast tells the same story from a different angle. An earlier February 2026 projection expected India’s 2026 shipments to fall 9.8% from 2025’s record, that forecast was later revised to a smaller 5.3% contraction in March, with a 3.1% rebound projected for 2027 once memory supply is expected to normalize. Even the correction to the correction is a real, dated signal of how fast this specific situation has been moving.

Gartner’s own analysts flagged something else worth knowing: even the seemingly healthy Q1 2026 growth figure, +4% year over year, was likely inflated by retailers and manufacturers building up inventory ahead of the price increases everyone could see coming, not real end user demand.

The underlying cause sits outside the laptop industry entirely. Memory manufacturers have been redirecting production capacity toward the high bandwidth memory chips AI data centers need for training large models, a far more profitable product line than the standard DRAM laptops and phones use, which has left less capacity for consumer grade memory even as demand for PCs stayed strong through the Windows 10 refresh. Laptop buyers are, in a real sense, competing for the same factory capacity as the AI industry’s biggest data center buildouts.

What This Actually Meant for the Companies Selling You a Laptop

Dell‘s Client Solutions Group posted $14.609 billion in revenue for the quarter ended May 2026, up 17% year over year, with operating income up 79%. HP‘s Personal Systems segment posted $10.2 billion for its fiscal Q2 2026, up 13% year over year.

Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, its PC business specifically, posted full year revenue of $58.9 billion for the fiscal year ended March 2026, up 17%, part of a total group revenue of $83.1 billion. All three companies were still growing revenue through the Windows 10 refresh window, even as unit shipments turned negative later in the same period, price increases from the memory shortage are already showing up as higher revenue per unit sold.

None of these three companies break laptops out separately from desktops, workstations, and accessories in their public financial reporting, so these figures describe each company’s whole PC adjacent business, not laptops alone. Apple, the fourth largest global vendor by unit share at 9.4%, doesn’t report unit or revenue figures broken out by product category at all beyond its broader Mac segment, making it the least transparent of the major vendors on this specific question.

Gaming Laptops Have Their Own Market, and Their Own Disagreement

Gaming laptops specifically, the category Razer and boutique builders compete in, has its own dedicated research coverage, and like most segments in this article, the named firms don’t agree with each other.

Each firm’s own most recently published figure, checked August 2026. Broader market estimates from other firms range as high as roughly $19.3 billion for 2026, a real spread even within one relatively narrow product category.

The “PC Market Is Dying” Narrative Doesn’t Hold Up Anymore, But Neither Does the Opposite

Tech commentary spent much of 2020 through 2023 treating the PC market as a permanently shrinking category, phones and tablets eating its lunch for good. That framing is now outdated, 2025 was the strongest single year of growth in over a decade by both major trackers’ counts.

But swinging to “the PC is back for good” is equally wrong. 2025’s growth was a specific, one time refresh cycle tied to Windows 10’s end of support, and 2026 has already proven genuinely volatile in both directions, healthy looking growth in Q1 that Gartner itself flagged as inventory front loading, followed by a real decline in Q2 once the memory shortage actually hit. The honest read: this was a real cyclical rebound, not proof the long running decline reversed for good.

What This Actually Means If You Need a Laptop Right Now

Put the refresh cycle, the vendor rankings, and the memory shortage together, and the practical picture is fairly specific. The window of genuinely competitive, refresh cycle driven pricing that ran through most of 2025 has closed, replaced by a real, ongoing cost increase that manufacturers are actively passing on to buyers as memory components get more expensive through 2026.

That doesn’t mean waiting indefinitely is the right move either. TrendForce’s own forecast has memory prices staying elevated through the rest of 2026 rather than a quick correction, and a machine still running Windows 10 has already been unsupported and unpatched for months. The realistic trade off is between buying now at today’s already elevated prices or waiting for a price environment that current forecasts don’t actually show improving anytime soon.

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