According to TrendForce, the average price of laptops could increase by as much as 40% due to increasing RAM, SSD and CPU prices, as the market dries up with manufacturers ignoring traditional markets for consumer and business PCs and server and instead diverting nearly all of their production capacity to higher margin items, such as HBM RAM (high bandwidth), which is used by hyperscalers building out AI datacentres.
The average mainstream laptop price of $900 could raise by as much as 40% through the next couple of quarters.
I’ve seen big increases in the prices of laptops we buy at work. We have stopped the normal replacement cycle and are only replacing devices on an as-needed basis. If a laptop breaks or somebody is having real performance problems, we will replace it, but if it is running normally, if a little slow, it won’t be replaced. I have told the business, we will keep the situation under review and see if the prices are coming back down in Q3/Q4.
I looked at outfitting a new server room at one of our sites. We bought 6 servers with 1TB RAM and 2 processors last year, for the new site, the supplier wanted more for 4 servers with 0.5TB RAM and 1 processor each! It was a similar story in our US office, where we wanted a new laptop. We were paying around $1,000 for the laptop before Christmas, in Germany, the US supplier could only offer us the devices for around $1,800, then the price went up again, to over $2,000. We switched back from Dell to Lenovo, which could provide the laptop at around $1,800.
