#laptop-pricing

#laptop-pricing

"They have been more successful than anyone including themselves could have anticipated," said Nick Giles, a senior research analyst at B. Riley Securities who covers several of the firms, most of which are public.

The fix, he told me, was temporary - he didn't have the right part and couldn't get it. This experience revealed a broader shift in how modern products are designed, sold, and owned - one that increasingly treats repair as optional and replacement as inevitable.

US PC shipments are set to fall by 13 percent this year thanks to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, with budget PCs hardest hit. Memory and storage costs will see at least a 60 percent increase during Q1 2026, compounding last year's rises of 40 to 70 percent.

After Google released its TurboQuant compression algorithm, which can purportedly drastically reduce the amount of memory required for certain AI workflows, stock prices for memory manufacturers dropped significantly.

"At present, the total cost of the product has far exceeded our selling price, even approaching twice the price we originally set."

This is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry has faced since its inception. This is not just a temporary situation. This is going to result in a structural reset of the entire industry, in terms of size, in terms of competitive landscape, of the product mix and also on the price.