The average American PC now costs more than $1,000

The average PC sold in the United States now costs more than $1,000. That has never happened before.

Average sell-in prices crossed the line in the second quarter, up 12.0% year on year, according to Omdia.

US shipments grew 1.0% in the quarter to 18.8 million units, after falling 7.0% in the first. Omdia expects that to be brief. It forecasts a 10.7% decline for the full year.

The growth is not demand

One word in the data does a lot of work. These are sell-in shipments, meaning units moving into the channel rather than machines bought by people.

Retailers and channel partners stocked up ahead of price rises. Memory and storage were getting more expensive, so buyers of PCs bought early to beat the increase.

Omdia is direct about what that means for later.

“The shipment volume observed in the second quarter represents borrowed volume from 2027,” said Scott Braverman, a senior analyst at the firm. “Combined with persistent supply constraints and elevated prices, we anticipate continued pressure on buyer demand, and subsequently shipment volumes, throughout 2027.”

The second half of 2026 is forecast to fall 18.4%. Another 4.9% comes off in 2027.

Revenue rose four times faster than volume

Shipments went up 1.0%. Revenue went up 13.1%.

“The US PC market in 2Q26 benefited from rising average selling prices (ASPs) driven by organic premiumization and supply-driven cost inflation,” Braverman said. “While shipment growth was muted at 1.0%, US PC market revenue increased by 13.1% as OEMs prioritized production of higher-margin, higher-cost PCs amid component constraints. The impact was most pronounced in the business segment, where ASPs rose 19.0% as enterprises sought to secure pricing amid uncertainty over future costs. Consumer ASPs also increased 9.7%, as higher costs were passed on to end users.”

The squeeze fell on the cheap end. Shipments of PCs under $699 dropped 6.5%. Shipments above $1,500 rose 36.8%.

AI PCs made up 48.3% of US shipments in the quarter. Omdia expects them to pass half for the first time in the third.

The same pattern showed up in the retailers’ own numbers. Best Buy, CDW and Insight Enterprises each reported that higher computing prices offset softer volumes in their most recent quarters.

Which buyers stop buying

Government took the hardest hit in the quarter. Shipments fell 24.4% as higher prices met federal budgets. Omdia forecasts a 19.2% fall for the full year.

Education went the other way in the quarter, up 9.9%, though volumes stayed below where they were two years ago. The full-year forecast is a 2.6% decline.

Consumer shipments grew 2.8% in the quarter and are forecast to fall 13.6% across the year. Commercial is expected to hold up better at a 9.3% decline.

Neither is forecast to return to growth before 2028.

Supply is only half of that. Many US enterprises refreshed their PC fleets in 2025, ahead of the end of Windows 10 support. Those machines are new. The refresh that would normally come next has already happened.

Apple passed Lenovo

Apple moved into third place in the US, ahead of Lenovo, on shipment growth of 32.1%.

Omdia credits a full quarter of MacBook Neo availability. Apple’s share of the US consumer PC segment reached 29.4%, and its business shipments grew 50.6%.

Dell fell hardest of the majors, down 8.8%, as component allocation moved away from entry-level machines. Its US Chromebook shipments fell 47.0%, against a 10.0% decline for the US Chromebook market as a whole.

HP held the top spot with 24.4% share on shipments down 3.7%. Lenovo grew 2.0%. Acer grew 12.8%.

Both HP and Dell grew revenue while shipping fewer machines. That is the whole story of the quarter in one line.

The US went one way and everyone else went the other

This is the part worth holding onto, because it is not in the release.

Omdia reported in July that global PC shipments fell 3.6% in the same quarter, to 65.7 million units. The US grew 1.0%. Same firm, same three months, opposite directions.

Treat the gap carefully. The global figure covers desktops, notebooks and workstations, while this one excludes tablets and does not say what else it excludes. The direction still holds.

Europe looks worse than either. We reported on Tuesday that the analyst firm Context expects European laptop shipments to fall 6.4% in the third quarter and 20% in the fourth, with desktops down around 20% and almost 30%.

So American channel partners could afford to stock up early. European ones are cutting orders instead.

The price floor may not come back down

Omdia expects ASPs to keep rising into early 2027, and higher prices will not cover the lost volume. It forecasts total US PC market revenue falling 6.0% next year.

The firm has made a broader argument about what happens after that. In August it said the phone market had undergone a structural repricing, where buyers get used to higher prices and manufacturers set their next prices from that base.

Nothing in this release says the same about PCs. It is worth watching for.

What to watch

Whether the borrowed volume shows up as a hole. Omdia has said where it expects the gap to appear, and third-quarter numbers will start to test it.

What happens to memory supply. Micron’s Taiwan unions were preparing a strike vote this month, at a company running DRAM fabrication and packaging on the island.

And whether European shipments fall as far as Context expects. The American market got a quarter of borrowed growth. Europe was never offered one.