PC Shipments Poised For One Last Holiday Blitz Before It All Hits The Fan
By now you've likely heard the gloom and doom scenario facing the PC market, and if you're looking for some much-needed holiday cheer to lift your spirits, there are indications that we'll see a strong finish to the year in terms of PC shipments. Despite consecutive quarters of decline, the PC market is expected to have grown when looking back at 2025.
That outlook is coming from market research firm Omdia (formerly Canalys), which indicates that PC shipments (not including tablets) to the U.S. fell 1% to 17.7 million units in the third quarter of 2025, after having fallen in the previous quarter as well. However, the consumer segment managed to overcome downward macroeconomic pressures to grow 8% in the quarter to 7.6 million units.
"Even with two consecutive quarters of overall decline, Omdia’s outlook for the holiday season remains positive and the U.S. PC market is still expected to grow in 2025, with full-year shipments forecast to increase by 4%," Omdia states.
What happens in 2026 and beyond is a little trickier to forecast. Memory chip demand to feed the increasingly-hungry AI market has led to DRAM pricing going through the roof, to the point where building a new PC from the ground up is almost sickening proposition. But hey, at least GPU prices have stabilized somewhat, right?
Unfortunately, it may not stop with DRAM. The memory chip shortage, which prompted Micron to pull its Crucial brand from the consumer market after 29 years to focus on more lucrative data center clients, could drive up storage costs too. And that's just one aspect of the overall landscape.
"The education and government segments have both moved into a pattern of continual decline after a strong start to the year in Q1," said Greg Davis, analyst at Omdia. "There are a few drivers behind this. First, government funding for both schools and government agencies has been reduced. The United States has seen record layoffs in these areas in 2025, so it is not surprising that technology spending is also falling. Second, and less immediately visible, is the unwinding of elevated inventory levels that were built up earlier in the year to soften the impact of tariffs."
On a positive note, Omdia anticipates that clearing out excess inventories will create room for new shipments, which in turn will moderate the rate of decline, particularly in the commercial segment.
Bear in mind that Omdia is only looking at the U.S. market and not the global landscape. As such, it's auditing shows that HP and Dell are the top dogs in market share at 24.4% and 22.5%, respectively, followed by Lenovo at 18.1%, Apple at 17.9%, Acer at 4.6%, and all others accounting for 12.5%.
This is a different ranking than firms like IDC have of the global landscape, which show Lenovo out in front. And according to Counterpoint Research, Lenovo recently saw its biggest shipment growth in three years.
Despite the many challenges facing the PC market, Omdia's outlook has PC shipments in the U.S. staying fairly steady in the consumer space for the next several years, so perhaps it's not all doom and gloom after all.
