The knock-on effects of all this will extend (and already are extending) well beyond traditional PCs. Valve confirmed the Steam Deck is sold out globally due to memory and storage shortages, while Framework has raised DDR5 RAM upgrade prices by 50% for its DIY laptop edition in December and warned prices would likely rise again. Motherboard sales in some markets have dropped as much as 50% as builders balk at the cost of memory.
IDC published its own updated forecast on February 26, and its numbers are now worse than Gartner's across the board. IDC projects the worldwide PC market will decline 11.3% in 2026, exceeding Gartner's 10.4%. Its smartphone outlook is even worse, with IDC expecting a 12.9% decline, far steeper than Gartner's 8.4%. Both figures represent a dramatic downward revision from IDC's December 2025 scenarios, which ranged from -4.9% to -8.9% for PCs and -2.9% to -5.2% for smartphones.
Part of this worsening picture is a pull-forward effect caused by PC and smartphone vendors shipping aggressively in Q4 2025 and into Q1 2026, rushing to get products out before memory price increases took full effect. IDC expects volumes to fall off dramatically starting in Q2. PC revenues will still grow 1.6% in 2026 thanks to higher ASPs, but neither market is expected to rebound until 2028.
IDC, like Gartner, sees the most damage at the budget-end of the market. More than 360 million smartphones shipped below $150 last year, and IDC said rising memory costs are rendering that price band unsustainable. Ultra-low-end smartphones below $50 could cease to exist, potentially reversing smartphone penetration gains in emerging markets. IDC does not expect a return to 2025 pricing within its forecast horizon.
Potentially. Some prices are now stabilizing, though at levels that remain two to three times higher than mid-2025, and European DDR5 pricing has shown modest corrections from early-February peaks. If new memory fab capacity comes online faster than expected, or if AI infrastructure spending plateaus — unlikely — the worst-case scenarios may not fully materialize.
But the structural driver of this crisis, the deliberate reallocation of memory manufacturing capacity from consumer DRAM and NAND toward AI-focused HBM and high-density server modules, doesn’t look to be going anywhere, anytime soon. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all prioritized HBM production, with Micron even controversially shuttering its Crucial consumer business , while TrendForce bleakly estimates that data centers will consume 70% of all memory chips manufactured in 2026.
Gartner advised vendors to accept unit volume declines rather than erode margins chasing price-sensitive buyers, and flagged the first half of 2026 as a critical window for optimizing pricing before component inflation compresses profitability further in Q2 and beyond. For consumers and builders, the calculus is straightforward: the era of cheap memory that defined the last several years of PC building is over, and nothing in the current data suggests it will return soon.
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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.\u00a0 Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.\u00a0 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-18/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/2026-will-bring-sharpest-pc-declines-in-over-a-decade#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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