(PR) Global PC Shipments Grew 3% in 1Q26 as Supply Chain Impacts Emerged

According to the latest research from Omdia, total shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations in 1Q26 increased by 3.2% year-over-year to 64.8 million units. Notebooks (including mobile workstations) saw a modest year-over-year increase of 2.6% in Q1 to 50.8 million units. Meanwhile, desktops (including desktop workstations) performed slightly better, up 5.4% to 14.0 million units. Growth was supported by vendors and channel partners pulling orders forward ahead of a widely anticipated increase in component costs, the continuation of the Windows 10 replacement cycle that is still driving commercial refresh budgets, and by a heavier than usual slate of spring product launches across both Windows OEMs and Apple.

“With supply-chain pressures still building, Q1’s modest growth is likely to mark the high point for the year,” said Ben Yeh, Principal Analyst at Omdia. “Memory and storage costs are expected to rise further and more steeply than previously assumed from Q2, squeezing PC vendor gross margins and forcing them to pass costs through to channel partners and end-customers. AI data center build-outs are crowding consumer categories out of memory and storage supply, which have already seen roughly five-fold and three-fold cost increases respectively since Q1 2025. CPU prices are a smaller but compounding pressure, with Intel and AMD projecting increases of 10-25% into Q2.”