Memory Shortage Chokes The PC Market Into A 4% Q2 Decline, Leaving Only ASUS And Apple Growing

The PC market continues to struggle due to memory shortages, with the latest stats reporting a 4% decline in Q2 2026 as prices continued to climb.

ASUS & Apple Were The Only PC Makers Who Saw Share Growth In Q2 2026 But Continue To Struggle Due To Memory Shortages

The latest market statistics from Counterpoint Research for Q2 2026 are in, and show that the PC market declined 4% in Q2 2026 versus the prior year. PC shipments reached 65 million units, which broke the growth trend that started in Q1 2025, but have since been on a decline as the memory crisis intensifies.

All PC manufacturers have been forced to absorb higher memory prices due to intensifying DRAM shortages, and that has led to some big price increases across entire product portfolios. While the market has seen a diverse range of new platforms show up based on Intel's latest 18A Core Series 3 chips, AMD's refreshed Ryzen families, and Apple's MacBook Neo, DRAM prices have more than doubled, suppressing consumer demand across PC, Smartphone, and Console segments.

In Q2 2026, 78% of the market share was controlled by five vendors, including Lenovo with a 25.6% market share (-2% decline), HP with a 20% market share (-8% decline), & Dell with a 14.3% share (-6% decline). ASUS and Apple were the only two PC OEMs to witness a positive trend, with ASUS climbing 4% for a total market share of 7.4% while Apple posted a 13% growth for a share of 10.5%.

• Lenovo maintained its market leadership with a 25.6% share, despite shipments decreasing 2% YoY to 16.6 million units. Lenovo’s purchasing scale and deep supply chain relationships cushioned it from the worst of the memory shortage.
• HP showed the biggest drop among the top three players, with an 8% YoY decline in shipments. HP's product mix remains highly exposed to the mainstream consumer and mid-range enterprise fleets, the exact segments most sensitive to the component-driven price hikes.
• Dell also turned downward with a 6% YoY decrease in shipments. Dell’s commercial focus shielded it from the dramatic collapse seen in pure consumer markets, capturing reliable enterprise IT budget dollars despite the macro headwinds.
• Apple’s successful launch of Neo helped the brand show enormous growth in this quarter, with shipments increasing 13% YoY.
• ASUS also showed strong momentum with 4% growth in shipments. The brand has been incredibly agile in adopting new silicon architecture. By being among the first to heavily back diverse AI PC formats (from mainstream Vivobook to high-end ProArt systems), ASUS has successfully captured early-adopter consumer mindshare.

In the coming months, the situation for PC makers will remain sluggish as memory and storage prices are expected to see over 50% hikes. Furthermore, PC markets are increasingly shifting the focus from entry-level and mainstream segments to higher-end platforms, including the Premium AI PC segment, as those offer better performance and enhanced local AI capabilities that make it easy for them to justify higher prices to consumers.

Associate Director David Naranjo said, “The memory shortage is no longer just a short-term supply problem. It has become a key factor changing the direction of the PC industry. As OEMs face higher component costs, the market will shift toward premium AI PCs, since their better performance and on-device AI features make higher prices easier to accept. Enterprise demand should stay strong because of Windows upgrades and more AI use, but consumer demand will probably stay limited until component costs come down. As a result, 2026 is likely to focus more on creating value than on growing shipments.”

This cycle is expected to last several years, and memory makers have warned that the situation will stay this way for a decade, while others are estimating that the next year will break all records in terms of DRAM shortages.

The main takeaway from this is that the PC market is unlikely to recover from this crisis for a good while, and the additional capacity that is being brought up by the "Big 3" is unlikely to change things for the consumer segment, as the companies are engaged in long-term deals with AI firms who have locked in a multi-year supply agreement.

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