Laptop Prices Are Climbing Fast. Is It Time to Stop Buying Them?

Budget season has an uncomfortable surprise for anyone planning a hardware refresh this year. The laptops you bought without much thought a couple of years ago now cost noticeably more, the cheap options are thinning out, and you get less memory and storage for your money than you used to. The reason is stranger than a simple supply hiccup: the artificial intelligence boom is quietly driving up the price of ordinary business laptops. With prices rising fast and expected to stay high, it is worth asking a question most businesses never thought to: is it time to stop buying laptops altogether?

What is actually behind the price rises, how long they are likely to last, what they mean for your refresh budget, and how virtual desktops let you sidestep the problem are all worth setting out plainly before you commit this year’s spend.

Why Are Laptop Prices Climbing So Fast?

Because the world’s memory chips are being hoovered up by AI. Building and running the enormous data centres behind AI requires vast quantities of memory and storage, and chip manufacturers have redirected their production towards those high-value AI products, leaving far less capacity for the memory that goes into ordinary laptops and phones. The result is a shortage, and shortages push prices up. Gartner estimates that the combined price of memory and storage will surge around 130% by the end of 2026 compared with 2025, which it expects to push average PC prices up by about 17%. One analysis puts AI data centres as absorbing roughly 70% of global memory chip output, which gives a sense of how lopsided the competition for supply has become.

The effect is sharper than the headline 17% suggests, because memory is becoming a bigger slice of what a laptop costs, rising from around 16% of a PC’s component cost to a projected 23%. The cheap end of the market is hit hardest, with the very inexpensive models expected to largely disappear within a couple of years. On top of the memory squeeze, machines now need higher specifications to run Windows 11 well following the end of Windows 10 support, which we covered in our piece on Windows 10 reaching end of life, adding yet more to the bill. In short, you are paying more for less.

Is This a Blip or the New Normal?

The instinct to simply wait it out is understandable, but the timing does not favour it. This is not a one-year wobble that corrects by spring. Analysts expect the memory shortage to persist well into 2027, and some in the industry have warned that 2027 could be the worst year of it rather than the recovery. Planning on prices snapping back to 2024 levels any time soon is optimistic. For budgeting purposes, the sensible assumption is that elevated hardware prices are the environment you will be operating in for the next couple of years, not a temporary inconvenience to ride out.

What Does This Mean for Your Refresh Budget?

That a refresh planned for this year lands at close to the worst possible moment. The fleet of laptops you were going to replace will cost meaningfully more than the last round, the budget-friendly models you might have chosen are fewer and weaker, and the machines you do buy may come with less memory and storage than you would have got for the same money a year ago. A hardware refresh has always been a lump of capital spending, and right now that lump is bigger and buys less. Signing it off on autopilot, the way refreshes usually get signed off, means absorbing the full force of the price spike without pausing to ask whether there is a better use of the money, a question we also raise in our piece on what to ask before buying another round of laptops.

The Catch: Keeping Old Laptops Longer Carries Its Own Risk

The obvious response to expensive new hardware is to hold onto the old hardware for longer, and the market is already doing exactly that. Gartner expects business PC lifetimes to stretch by around 15% as buyers delay upgrades. The problem is that ageing hardware brings its own costs. Older batteries, storage and cooling systems become more likely to fail, so reliability drops just as you are leaning on the machines harder. More seriously, ageing laptops tend to fall behind on security, struggling to run current, supported software and becoming easier targets as a result. So the natural money-saving move, just keep the old ones going, quietly increases your exposure if you do it the usual way, with everything still running on and stored on those tired machines. That is the bind: new hardware is painfully expensive, and old hardware is a growing risk.

How Do Virtual Desktops Square This Circle?

They resolve the bind by changing what the laptop actually has to do. With a virtual desktop, the real computer runs in a secure data centre, and the laptop in front of the person only needs to display the screen and handle the typing and clicking. The heavy processing and all the data live centrally, not on the device. That single shift changes the hardware equation completely.

Because the device is no longer doing the demanding work, you do not need to buy powerful, expensive, memory-heavy laptops at all. Cheaper, simpler machines do the job perfectly well, and the older laptops you already own can keep serving as windows onto a modern desktop for years longer than they would otherwise be viable. Crucially, the security worry around ageing hardware shrinks, because the sensitive work and the data are not sitting on that tired laptop, they are in the managed data centre, where the actual computing environment is always current and properly maintained. You get to extend the life of cheap or ageing devices, which is exactly what the price spike pushes you towards, without inheriting the security and reliability problems that normally come with running old kit. The approach is set out in our AI-powered virtual desktops, and it is the same logic we weigh up in our comparison of new laptops versus virtual desktops.

But Doesn’t the Cloud Use Memory Too?

It is a fair question, and honesty matters here. Data centres do run on memory, so the same shortage does put some upward pressure on cloud costs as well, and nobody is entirely insulated from it. The practical advantage is not that the cloud is magically immune, but that it changes your exposure. Instead of absorbing a fleet-wide capital shock by buying dozens of expensive new laptops at peak prices, you keep the cheap and existing devices you already have, and you turn your computing into a predictable monthly cost rather than a large, badly-timed purchase. You are also spared the repeat of that purchase in three years, and the one after that. Trading a big, front-loaded hardware bill at the worst possible moment for a steady, manageable operating cost is a considerably more comfortable position when hardware prices are spiking, which connects to the broader savings we set out in our piece on what you stop paying for when you move to the cloud.

A Better Question Than “Which Laptops?”

The reflex every budget season is to ask which laptops to buy and how many. The memory shortage is a good moment to ask a better one: do we need to keep buying them at all? With prices up 17% and climbing, the cheap options vanishing, and the shortage expected to run into 2027, committing to another expensive fleet right now is a hard case to make on the numbers. Virtual desktops offer the way out of the trap, letting you run older and cheaper devices safely for far longer because the real computer, and your data, live in the data centre rather than in everyone’s bag. The hardware spike is painful if you are tied to buying hardware. It is largely someone else’s problem if you are not.