In the first quarter of 2026, the global laptop market appears headed for an unprecedented situation. The latest forecast data released by TrendForce, a global market research firm, carries content shocking enough to send a chill through the entire PC industry. Among its findings is the indication that mainstream laptops priced around $900 could see price increases of nearly 40%. This is not merely temporary inflation or a retail margin-securing maneuver. It signals the arrival of a structural crisis—one born from the fundamental rewriting of resource allocation at the very foundation of the semiconductor supply chain, driven by the enormous gravitational pull of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Bill of Materials (BOM) Reaches Its Breaking Point: Memory and Processors Squeeze Manufacturing Costs
To understand the severity of the situation, one must examine how the composition ratio of the Bill of Materials (BOM) for laptop manufacturing is shifting. Under conventional market conditions, memory-related components—consisting of DRAM and NAND flash (SSD)—accounted for only about 15% of total BOM costs. However, according to TrendForce's analysis, this ratio is projected to exceed 30% in the first quarter of 2026.
A careful reading of TrendForce's forecast model reveals that their assumed baseline is a $900 laptop from the first quarter of 2025. At that point, memory-related costs remained within an acceptable range. However, as demand for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) used in AI servers and enterprise-grade high-speed storage has expanded at an abnormal pace, supply allocations for consumer devices are currently being squeezed to the absolute limit.
What is even more concerning is that the view that this supply shortage will persist is becoming entrenched in the market. Some management figures at storage device manufacturers have even pointed out the possibility that severe NAND shortages could force certain home appliance makers to halt operations due to an inability to secure necessary components. The situation has moved beyond mere price negotiations and transformed into a survival game to secure supply allocations themselves.
Shifting Price Foundations for Intel and AMD: Expanding Hardware Costs
Memory is not the only factor driving up costs. The CPU—the brain of the PC—is also caught in its own wave of supply uncertainty and price revisions. According to TrendForce's market research, Intel, the industry's largest player, has already raised prices for some entry-level and previous-generation laptop CPUs by more than 15%, and is showing signs of implementing further price revisions for mid-range and higher platforms in the second quarter of 2026.
Historically, CPUs have accounted for approximately 30% of laptop BOM costs as a standard weighting. Combined with the aforementioned memory costs (15%), major semiconductors alone made up 45% of total costs. However, with the simultaneous ripple effects of rising processor prices and surging memory prices, it is estimated that the share of these semiconductor components within the overall BOM will jump to 58% by 2026.
The remaining 42% must cover all the physical costs of display panels, large-capacity batteries, chassis materials, motherboards, and cooling systems. It is effectively impossible for OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) to absorb this increase in manufacturing costs through internal efforts alone, making a pass-through to retail prices unavoidable. If manufacturers attempt to maintain their profit margins, the calculation shows that they will ultimately have no choice but to raise final retail prices by approximately 40%.
The Endless Spillover of AI Investment: The "Invisible Tax" Borne by Consumers
The underlying cause of this abnormal price surge lies in the AI infrastructure development race that has engulfed the entire technology industry. As the industry moves beyond mere training GPUs within data centers and enters the phase of full-scale enterprise adoption of highly autonomous "agentic AI," infrastructure requirements are expanding rapidly.
Investments worth trillions of yen, led by Nvidia's GPU architecture and Big Tech's proprietary inference chips, are absorbing the world's advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity without exception. Production lines for advanced process nodes and cutting-edge packaging at major foundries like TSMC are being allocated with top priority to AI chips that generate overwhelming profits, and as a result, production allocations for the lower-margin general-purpose processors used in consumer PCs are being structurally squeezed out.
What is happening here is a cold-hearted structure in which the astronomical costs of building cutting-edge AI infrastructure running in the cloud are ultimately being passed on to the prices of laptops for general consumers. Regardless of whether they directly and fully enjoy the benefits of advanced AI features, consumers are effectively being made to pay the bill for the technology industry's fervor in the form of an across-the-board increase in hardware prices.
The Weakening of the Windows Ecosystem: The Shaken Rationale for Entry-Level Products
The area hit hardest by this market shift is the sub-$700 entry-level and mid-range market, where Windows devices have long held overwhelming dominance. For educational institutions, small and medium-sized businesses, and light users, being able to obtain a laptop with sufficient practical performance for under $700 was the platform's greatest strength.
However, component shortages and rising costs are putting small PC brands—which lack the benefits of economies of scale—through a harsh trial. A select few Tier 1 major PC manufacturers are moving to minimize damage through their negotiating power, backed by long-term supply contracts with processor vendors and large-scale purchasing power. Meanwhile, other mid-tier brands are struggling even to secure components, being forced to procure parts at extremely high spot prices.
Moreover, risk-diversification measures within the ecosystem are backfiring. While manufacturers adopted multi-platform strategies to spread procurement risk—shifting from an Intel-only approach toward AMD processors—the resulting wave of shortages has spread even to the entry-level tier of AMD platforms. The enormous pie represented by the affordable Windows device market itself is becoming untenable from a manufacturing profitability standpoint.
Apple's Redefinition: MacBook's Newfound Relative Price Advantage
As the Windows platform is swept up in the waves of supply chain disruption and cost surges, the market position of Apple—which has built a fully independent silicon design and procurement network—is undergoing a dramatic shift. Through the robust control afforded by their proprietary "Apple Silicon" ecosystem, they maintain a certain distance from the volatility of the external commodity components market.
The fact that Apple devices, once perceived as "expensive premium machines," are beginning to gain relative price competitiveness is essential to understanding the industry's shifting balance of power. At a time when mainstream Windows laptop prices are being forcibly pushed above $1,000, the presence of Apple's product lineup is growing more prominent. Priced at $999 with 16GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage as the standard configuration, the M5 chip-equipped MacBook Air is emblematic of this shift.
Furthermore, the introduction of a new price-disrupting device called the "MacBook Neo" makes the situation even more decisive. Built around the A18 Pro chip and launched at a price point of $699—unthinkable for a Mac product until now—this device has completely rewritten the rules for the low-price segment. In a market where Windows machines were previously the only option under the $700 constraint, the existence of the MacBook Neo—available for half the price of increasingly expensive Windows devices—functions as a powerful blow against the very hegemony of the PC industry.
The Cloud-and-Edge Dilemma: Forecasting the Future of the PC Market
Amid this harsh market environment, the very nature of personal computing is entering a turning point. The surge in hardware prices is not merely a temporary imbalance caused by component shortages—it is exerting pressure that forces a fundamental reconsideration of the role of the "PC" as a device.
One inevitable trend is the thorough thin-clientization of client devices and accelerating dependence on the cloud. Rather than purchasing unreasonably expensive hardware to secure processing power that completes locally, the paradigm is shifting toward keeping hardware limited to low-cost access terminals while offloading all high-load computation and AI processing to cloud infrastructure.
This aligns perfectly with the scenario envisioned by Big Tech. They sell AI subscriptions that run on their own cloud infrastructure, and the abnormal surge in hardware prices is, as a result, becoming a powerful driving force that pulls users strongly into their own ecosystems. The ideal of "democratizing the personal computer"—long championed by the industry—is receding, as devices grow ever more expensive. As access to high-performance computing resources reverts to being a luxury reserved for a select group of premium users, the very structure of the market appears set to undergo an irreversible transformation.
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