The personal computer has remained surprisingly resilient to change over the past 15 years. Apple promised a “post-PC” era with the iPad in 2010 and failed to deliver one. Smartphones even overtook laptops as the most popular device to connect to the internet a decade ago, but millions of people still kept buying PCs every year. But this PC resiliency is going to be tested even further this year.
RAM and NAND / SSD prices have surged in recent months due to shortages created by AI data center demand. Some stores have had to sell memory like it’s lobster, prebuilt PC costs have risen, and some assemblers are even selling PCs without RAM.
Now, we’re about to see how the shortage hits regular laptops and PCs from the likes of Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, and Acer. TrendForce predicts that memory prices are projected to “rise sharply again in the first quarter of 2026.” More price rises will only put further pressure on laptop and PC pricing, and we’re seeing early signs that PC makers are adjusting prices at CES this week.
Asus announced to its channel partners this week that it’s implementing price hikes across its products as a result of the memory market conditions. Dell also adjusted the launch pricing of its XPS 14 and XPS 16 just hours before they were announced this week, in a sign that laptop pricing is going to become increasingly fluid. Lenovo has been stockpiling PC memory to try and weather the storm throughout 2026, and HP has warned it will have to increase prices and offer lower RAM configurations later this year. Like Lenovo, HP also has a stockpile of memory, but it expects the continued rise in costs will begin eating into PC product margins by May.
There’s no quick fix for PC makers, either. Offering less RAM on laptops will be difficult for manufacturers, particularly below the 8GB threshold. Windows 11 has a minimum RAM requirement of 4GB, but it doesn’t run particularly well in those conditions. While TrendForce predicts some smartphones are likely to return to just 4GB this year, “for budget notebooks, DRAM cannot be reduced quickly due to processor pairing needs and operating system limitations.”
The timing of this memory shortage couldn’t be any worse for Microsoft and its PC partners. Windows 10 just hit end of life in October, and many businesses are in the process of migrating to Windows 11. That often involves a PC refresh cycle, and there were strong signs throughout 2025 that PC shipments were accelerating thanks to a refresh of the existing install base. That momentum could be derailed later this year once RAM stockpiles are depleted.
Timing isn’t the only problem for the PC market, as the increased prices of RAM and SSDs could be permanent instead of a temporary supply constraint. “This is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity,” warns IDC. “For decades, the production of DRAM and NAND Flash for smartphones and PCs was the primary driver for production. Today, that dynamic has inverted.”
The demand from hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon has pushed Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to pivot toward building high-bandwidth (HBM) and high-capacity DDR5 memory. “Every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop,” says IDC.
This is going to have a big impact on the DIY market and PC gaming, too. “PC gaming is thriving at a time when overall consumer PC shipments have declined by 14 percent in the last five years… annual gaming PC shipments are up 50 percent,” said Henry Lin, director of product management at Nvidia, in a briefing with The Verge last week.
The popularity of PC gaming has allowed smaller assemblers to offer custom prebuilt systems at competitive prices. These smaller builders can’t stockpile RAM or SSDs, and “will bear the greatest burden of the shortage,” warns IDC. “That in turn represents an opportunity for large OEMs to gain share from smaller assemblers in the gaming space by positioning prebuilt systems as offering higher value.”
Demand for memory looks set to impact GPU prices too. Rumors have suggested that Nvidia could force GPU partners to adjust pricing to factor in increased memory costs. “The demand for memory in the market is at record levels, and this does mean supply will be tight,” admitted Ben Berraondo, director of global PR for Nvidia GeForce, in a briefing with The Verge last week. “There have been no major changes in how we manage memory with our customers. There are no major supply chain changes to GeForce,” says Berraondo.
Despite a lack of major memory changes to GeForce, pricing is already starting to increase. Newegg has started listing a variety of RTX 5090 cards at well above $4,000. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find an RTX 5090 for under $3,000, after prices were close to the $1,999 retail price in September.
Berraondo didn’t comment directly on the rumors of $5,000 pricing for the RTX 5090, but he did point to Nvidia’s Founders Edition model still being listed at $1,999 at Best Buy. That’s great, but it’s constantly out of stock so it’s not representative of the true retail pricing of the RTX 5090.
If the costs of building a gaming PC don’t stabilize in 2026, Microsoft will also feel increased pressure on its next-gen Xbox plans. Microsoft is aggressively pivoting toward PC for the future of Xbox consoles, with the handheld Xbox Ally devices just the beginning of its plans. Component costs could force the price of the next-gen Xbox even higher and also impact Sony’s plans with the PS6 and Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine.
The memory shortage also threatens to impact Microsoft’s AI PC push. Microsoft set a surprising minimum of 16GB of RAM for its Copilot Plus PCs, in order to handle local small language models. Qualcomm has been pushing to bring Windows on Arm (Copilot Plus PCs) down to the $600 price range, but that effort looks set to reverse due to memory costs.
It increasingly feels like we’re witnessing a battle over the future of the PC, where component prices and AI features are having a big impact on computing. If AI demand wins the battle then more traditional computing tasks will increasingly be performed in the cloud. That could force businesses to increasingly move to virtual machines instead of refreshing laptops and gamers to look at cloud streaming services instead of buying an expensive gaming PC.
I don’t think this battle means the end of the PC anytime soon. It just feels like another step in Big Tech marching us toward an unproven AI future. I have faith the PC will survive and evolve and prove once again how important it truly is.
- Satya Nadella is now blogging about AI slop. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella created his very own “sn scratchpad” blog over the holidays, generating social media outrage in the process. Nadella’s first blog entry argues that everyone needs to move “beyond the arguments of [AI] slop vs sophistication.” It’s an argument that has gone viral on social media networks, with “Microslop” trending on X this week. That’s not too surprising, given the backlash to Microsoft’s big AI push. The Microslop moniker is particularly popular among gamers, who aren’t happy with the changes Microsoft has been making to Windows and Xbox.
- LG forced a Copilot web app onto its TVs, but will let you delete it. LG is letting users delete a Microsoft Copilot shortcut that it installed on newer TVs after a backlash over the unremovable icon. The icon was simply a shortcut to the web version of Copilot, but the response from Reddit users shows just how unpopular Copilot is among consumers.
- Microsoft isn’t rewriting Windows in Rust with AI. Continuing the backlash trend over Microsoft’s AI moves, distinguished engineer Galen Hunt announced that Microsoft was planning to eliminate “every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030” and use AI to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. The post led to headlines about Microsoft rewriting Windows in Rust with AI and plenty of concern over potential reliability issues for Windows. Hunt was forced to update his original post and clarify that Windows is not being rewritten in Rust with AI.
- Microsoft “Project Strong ARMed” is all about moving to ARM64. Over the holidays, Microsoft posted a new job listing that revealed the company has a “Project Strong ARMed” team that’s part of a strategic initiative meant to “transition to ARM64 architecture across the E+D (Experiences & Devices) division.” With Microsoft’s focus on AI features in Windows, its close partnership with Qualcomm, and Intel’s struggles, this all makes sense. Interestingly, part of the job is about driving adoption of Microsoft’s own Cobalt Arm-powered CPUs over traditional Intel and AMD chips.
- Three big Microsoft employee departures for 2026. Microsoft is losing veteran employees Steve Clayton and Louis Kahn. Clayton is leaving to become Cisco’s chief communications officer after 28 years at Microsoft, and Kahn is joining Nvidia after 32 years at Microsoft working closely on Xbox engineering. Manik Gupta, who was responsible for Microsoft Teams consumer, Skype, and GroupMe at Microsoft, is also leaving after nearly five years. Gupta first joined Microsoft in 2021, bringing a wealth of consumer app knowledge that Microsoft desperately needed at the time. It must have been a tough gig trying to turn around Skype and get consumers to care about Microsoft Teams.
- Dell admits consumers don’t care about AI PCs. In a surprisingly honest interview, Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, told PC Gamer that consumers simply aren’t buying PCs for AI features right now and they could even be confusing people. “What we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” said Terwilliger. The biggest benefits of a Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PC is the performance and battery life improvements instead of the AI features alone, and Dell is now starting 2026 by moving beyond being “all about” AI PCs.
- The first Xbox Game Pass drop of 2026 is a good one. Microsoft is adding Star Wars Outlaws to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on January 13th, followed by Resident Evil Village for Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass subscribers a week later on January 20th. Other titles coming to Game Pass this month include Brews & Bastards, Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition, Final Fantasy, My Little Pony: A Zephyr Heights Mystery, and Mio: Memories in Orbit. That’s a good start to the year for Game Pass, after a quiet end to 2025.
- No, Microsoft didn’t rebrand Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft has had big parts of the internet confused this week, again. Posts on Reddit, Hacker News, and X have all claimed that Microsoft has rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s all down to some confusing text on Microsoft’s Office.com website that makes it seem like Microsoft 365 Copilot app is the new name for Office. Microsoft renamed its Microsoft 365 hub app a year ago, but the internet only just found out about this change recently. Either way, Microsoft has clarified it hasn’t made any branding changes to Office. I’m hoping Microsoft updates its Office website to make things clearer, but I won’t hold my breath.
- Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Hisense TVs. Microsoft’s first Xbox announcement of 2026 is the launch of Xbox Cloud Gaming on select Hisense and V homeOS-powered smart TVs. The Xbox app first launched on Samsung TVs, followed by Amazon Fire TV devices, then select LG TVs, and now Hisense TVs. We don’t have an exact date for when the Xbox app will be available on the Hisense TVs, but Microsoft says it’s coming at some point in 2026.
- Qualcomm hints at Arm-powered Windows gaming handhelds. We haven’t seen any Arm-powered handheld gaming PCs at CES this year, but that might change in the coming months. Qualcomm has hinted to The Verge that we should be “keeping an eye” on GDC in March for possible Arm-powered Windows handhelds. That timing lines up with Microsoft’s plans to launch Windows 11 version 26H1 exclusively on Snapdragon X2 devices in the spring and would line up well with some upcoming Xbox PC features. All of this is coming on top of another great year for Windows on Arm.
- Microsoft Edge is getting a Copilot-inspired redesign. Microsoft is preparing to launch a major UI refresh of its Edge browser soon. The software maker has started bringing the design language from Copilot to early Canary and Dev test versions of its Microsoft Edge browser. The design changes include a settings section that looks identical to the Copilot app, updated context menus, and an updated new tab page. I don’t actually mind the Copilot UI itself, but I do wonder what this all means for the Fluent design language and whether we’ll see similar changes in Windows itself.
- Microsoft has removed phone activation from Windows. Microsoft has started changing the activation experience for perpetual Windows licenses. The traditional telephone-based product activation process was quietly removed on December 3rd, in favor of a fully online process. “Customers will instead use the Product Activation Portal,” says Katharine Holdsworth, partner group product manager at Microsoft, in a statement to Notepad. “Internet connection is not required for the device being activated; however, customers will require a secondary device, such as smartphone, tablet, or computer with internet connection to access the online portal.”
- Xbox’s Developer Direct returns on January 22nd. Microsoft’s annual Xbox Developer Direct event is taking place on January 22nd this year. The fourth Developer Direct will provide a closer look at two of Microsoft’s biggest Xbox games this year, Forza Horizon 6 and Fable, as well as a first in-depth look at Beast of Reincarnation from Game Freak. I’m hoping we might get a release date for Fable, but Microsoft will likely play it safe with the broad 2026 release window instead.
I’m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at notepad@theverge.com if you want to discuss anything else. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.
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