Before price increases began to define memory as well as GPUs, or graphics processing units towards the end of 2025, PC makers took advantage of significant momentum to clock 270 million unit shipments through the year. Research firm Gartner’s latest shipments data marks this as a 9.1% annual growth compared with the year prior. International Data Corporation (IDC) numbers chart this `annual growth at 9.6%, with 284.7 million units shipped.
This marks a significant turnaround, following two years of consistent decline through 2022 and 2023, with only a modest revival of PC shipment trajectory in 2024. One of the key drivers for sales through 2025 was the scheduled end of life moment for Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system in October. Businesses generally would be averse to running an outdated OS on PCs running on corporate networks.
This also tied in with the conversation around artificial intelligence, or AI PCs, a cause Microsoft is championing. However, returns from the AI specific part of AI PCs, remains a long-term bet at best. “Another factor for growth in 2025 was vendors focused heavily on promoting AI PCs to capture replacement demand. However, most AI PC features, such as local inference, have yet to deliver significant productivity gains compared to cloud-based AI solutions,” notes Rishi Padhi, research principal at Gartner.
“As a result, many organisations are upgrading primarily to future-proof their fleets, rather than to realise immediate business value from AI capabilities,” he adds. Microsoft has been roundly criticised by customers, particularly on social media, for forcing the Copilot AI assistant across the Windows 11 as well as core app experiences (these include the Microsoft 365 Copilot office apps),
According to Gartner’s numbers, Lenovo maintained its lead with the most shipments through the year with 73,567 units, and extended its market share in the process to 27.2% compared with 25.3% the year prior. HP (57,457 units and 21.3% share), Dell (41,392 units and 15.3% share) and Apple (24,826 units for 9.2% share) remained within range of their 2024 shipment performance. The ranking order hasn’t changed either.
The data indicates Q4 2025 played a crucial role in continuing this momentum through to the close of the year amid challenges from component price increases due to higher purchases of inventory by AI data centres. In Q4 itself, shipments increased by 9.3% compared with the same period a year prior, at 71,496 units.
It is expected that shipments might see a dip in 2026 on the back of potential price increases for consumers as PC makers factor in higher costs of acquiring components such as memory and storage.
Jean Philippe Bouchard, who is research vice-president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, notes in the research firm’s latest Worldwide PC Market Tracker, expects that the PC market will not resemble the current contours.
“IDC expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months given how quickly the memory situation is evolving. Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand,” notes Bouchard.
It may be an understatement to say that the year ahead may be extremely volatile.
