Laptop prices rise as memory shortages squeeze PC market

Amazon’s Prime Day 2026 ran June 23-26 just as laptop shoppers were running into a harder market: prices have climbed on new machines, older inventory has stayed stubbornly expensive, and the usual bargain lanes have narrowed. The squeeze is coming from RAM, storage and other components, not from a single brand or one-off shortage.

Gartner said on February 26, 2026 that surging memory costs could cut worldwide PC shipments by 10.4% in 2026 while lifting PC prices by 17%. TrendForce followed on March 10 with a sharper warning for the notebook market, saying mainstream laptop prices could rise as much as 40% by 2026 as component costs keep rising. TrendForce also said Intel had already raised prices on some entry-level and older-generation notebook CPUs by more than 15%, a sign that the inflation is spreading beyond memory chips alone.

That matters because the pressure is now reaching models that have already been on shelves for months. Retailers have kept plenty of aging laptops at elevated prices, even as new releases arrive with higher starting prices than the previous generation. Lenovo has tried to blunt the damage: its chief financial officer, Winston Cheng, said late in 2025 that the company had increased inventory by 50% to buffer against memory shortages, but even that stockpiling has not removed the broader cost pressure.

The warning signs extend across the industry. Lenovo, Dell and HP have all been reported to be flagging higher PC prices as memory costs climb, and IDC said in December 2025 that the global memory shortage could persist well into 2027. That timeline leaves little reason to expect a quick reset in laptop pricing, especially if AI and data-center demand keep drawing supply away from consumer devices.

For buyers, the frame is simple. Buy now if a needed configuration is meaningfully discounted during Prime Day, because Amazon’s four-day sale, open only to Prime members, is one of the few large retail windows capable of offsetting the marketwide increase. Wait if the discount is small and the machine is already an older model, because the current pricing trend suggests that the next round of offers may not be materially better, and new inventory could arrive at even higher list prices.