PC shipments fell 22.4% in the third quarter as memory costs lifted prices

Gartner said Monday that worldwide PC shipments fell 22.4% in the third quarter to 55.4 million units as memory and storage cost inflation pushed up prices and cut volume across every top vendor.

The size of the drop

Gartner said Monday that worldwide PC shipments totaled 55.4 million units in the third quarter of 2026, down 22.4% from a year earlier. The firm called the results preliminary. Final estimates will change.

That unit level, Gartner said, is back near early-2023 volumes. The mechanism is different from the inventory hangover that followed the pandemic boom. Namrata Banerjee, a principal researcher at Gartner, said higher memory and storage costs are now fully reflected in PC pricing. DRAM costs surged five times year-over-year in the second quarter, and vendors passed those costs through, lifting average selling prices and cutting shipment volumes in the third quarter.

Vendors also reprioritized scarce components and shifted the mix toward higher-priced configurations. That reduced the availability of lower-cost machines for consumers, while businesses spent on targeted buys such as workstations and AI PCs rather than broad refresh programs.

Who held share — and who fell hardest

Every one of the top six vendors shipped fewer PCs than a year earlier. Lenovo stayed first at 14.99 million units and 27.1% share, matching the market's 22.4% decline. HP Inc. kept second place but posted the steepest top-six drop, with shipments down 30.9% to 10.37 million units and share falling to 18.7% from 21%. Dell was third at 7.58 million units, down 25.4%.

Apple recorded the smallest decline among the top six, with shipments down 7.1% to 5.84 million units. Its share rose 1.7 percentage points to 10.5%, which Gartner tied to mainstream MacBook strength. ASUS and Acer also lost units but gained share as the market shrank under them.

Gartner's table covers desktop and laptop PCs running Windows, macOS, or Chrome OS, measured as shipments into channels. Numbers are rounded estimates.

Other trackers see the same direction

Gartner is not alone in printing a steep third-quarter unit decline, and the other prints should not be mixed into Gartner's table. Omdia said on Oct. 9 that worldwide desktop, notebook, and workstation shipments fell 21.2% year-over-year to 58.1 million units in the third quarter, citing pull-forward demand earlier in the year and the pass-through of component costs into end-market prices. IDC's preliminary third-quarter estimate, reported Oct. 8 via PCMag, put the year-over-year drop at 20.1% to 62.7 million units and called it the worst third-quarter year-over-year decline in its record for that seasonal window.

Those firms use different scopes and methods. What they share with Gartner is the mechanism: memory and storage inflation is showing up in PC prices, and unit demand is responding.

Why it matters for investors

For investors in PC OEMs and memory suppliers, Monday's Gartner print is a clean unit-volume checkpoint after a year in which AI-driven memory demand has rewritten component pricing. The leaderboard barely moved. The volume did. HP's steeper drop and Apple's relative resilience are share stories inside a market that is smaller because devices cost more, not because Gartner is calling a demand cycle finished.

This is an industry research print, not an issuer earnings release. It does not disclose vendor ASPs, regional splits, or a final (non-preliminary) revision. Readers tracking the memory-cost thread already have related TickerGrove coverage on Korea's chip-heavy Kospi selloff and on Micron's repurchase authorization; those are separate events from this shipment table.