PC sales increase in 2025 despite customs chaos and RAM shortage
The end of Windows 10 fueled sales of notebooks, desktop PCs, and workstations. It is unclear whether 2026 will be a crisis year for the PC market.
(Image: William Potter/Shutterstock.com)
For PC manufacturers, 2025 was a gratifying year. According to market researchers at IDC, they sold over 285 million desktop PCs, notebooks, and workstations in the last 12 months. This represents an increase of eight percent compared to the previous year, when 263 million computers were sold.
Lenovo remains the market leader in terms of unit numbers, with more than one in five PCs originating from them. HP and Dell follow in second and third place. Lenovo also recorded the largest year-on-year growth of 14.5 percent. This continues the market concentration trend that has been in place for many years, as manufacturers outside the Top 5 collectively hold only a 24 percent share and achieved only modest growth of 1.4 percent.
| PC Market 2025 | |||||
| Manufacturers | PCs sold 2025 | Market share 2025 | PCs sold 2024 | Market share 2024 | Growth |
| Lenovo | 70.8 | 24.9% | 61.8 | 23.5% | 14.5% |
| HP | 57.5 | 20.2% | 53.0 | 20.1% | 8.4% |
| Dell | 41.1 | 14.4% | 39.1 | 14.8% | 5.2% |
| Apple | 25.6 | 9.0% | 23.0 | 8.7% | 11.1% |
| Asus | 20.5 | 7.2% | 18.0 | 6.8% | 13.4% |
| others | 69.3 | 24.3% | 68.3 | 25.9% | 1.4% |
| Total | 284.7 | 100.0% | 263.3 | 100.0% | 8.1% |
| Figures in millions (desktop PCs, notebooks, workstations, excluding x86 servers and tablets), Source: IDC | |||||
Regionally, sales developed very differently. Due to the customs policy of the Trump administration, there was an import boom in the USA at the beginning of 2025, while sales stagnated in the United States for the remaining three quarters. In Asia and Europe, however, sales grew double-digit from the second quarter onwards. The end of Windows 10 support likely played an important role here.
(Image:Â IDC)
Uncertainty due to high RAM prices
According to IDC, the exploding RAM prices rather fueled demand at the end of the year than curbed it. Many business customers brought forward planned purchases to secure computers before impending bottlenecks and higher notebook and complete PC prices in 2026. For private buyers, however, interest in older platforms like AM4 and LGA1700, which use the cheaper DDR4 RAM instead of the more modern DDR5 RAM, increased recently. Thus, the price for the eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5700X rose by 30 percent from 130 euros in September 2025 to over 170 euros. Intel's Core i5-14500 became 25 percent pricier in the same period, from 230 euros to the current 290 euros. CPU prices for Ryzen 9000 and Core Ultra 200S, however, remained stable.
For the current year, market researchers at IDC still see great uncertainty about how PC sales will develop. In addition to price increases, they expect manufacturers to increasingly bring devices with less RAM to market. Furthermore, the pressure on smaller manufacturers is increasing because the large ones can obtain RAM more cheaply through long-term supply contracts and are less affected by the shortage. End customers, especially PC enthusiasts, are postponing purchases or simply spending their money on other things.
(chh)
