PC shipments fall 20% in sharpest decline since Q1 2023

The PC market just had its worst quarter in more than three years. Global shipments fell roughly 20% year over year in Q3 2026, according to research firms Omdia and IDC. Omdia called it the industry’s sharpest decline since Q1 2023. The culprit is not a sudden loss of interest in laptops. It is artificial intelligence, which has been quietly buying up the memory chips that PCs need to function. The numbers behind the slump Omdia counted 58.1 million laptops, desktops, and workstations shipped worldwide in the quarter. That is a drop of 21.2% from the same period a year earlier. IDC’s tally came in a bit higher, at 62.7 million units, for a decline of 20.1%. Desktop shipments fell 23.5% to 11.7 million units. Notebooks dropped 20.6% to 46.4 million. Lenovo kept the top spot with around 14.9 million units shipped and roughly 24% to 26% market share, despite a decline of about 23%. HP posted the steepest drop among major vendors, falling approximately 31% to around 10.3 million units. Dell saw shipments shrink by around 25%. Apple held up better than most, with volumes down around 11%. ASUS posted the mildest decline of the group at 9%. How AI ate the PC’s lunch The core problem is m...