Laptops could soon cost 40% more, and you already know why

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Winners & losers: While a growing number of users are waiting for the AI bubble to finally burst, manufacturers are dealing with increasingly harsh constraints. The "traditional" supply chain is gone, and customers will likely pay the ultimate price for the whole mess, starting with mainstream laptop computers.

A recent analysis by TrendForce casts a dark shadow over the future of the most popular machines in the portable PC market. According to the consulting firm, "mainstream" notebooks may soon cost as much as 40% more. Growing challenges in CPU manufacturing are adding yet another layer of uncertainty to an already volatile memory chip market.

In TrendForce's definition, a mainstream notebook has a suggested retail price of $900. The baseline scenario modeled by the company assigns that price to a laptop PC sold during the first quarter of 2025. In the pre-AI bubble scenario, memory components such as DRAM and SSDs accounted for around 15% of the total bill of materials (BOM) required to manufacture a single notebook.

Just one year later, the memory-related share of the BOM is now expected to exceed 30%. If chipmakers and OEMs want to maintain their existing profit margins, a $900 mainstream laptop could soon carry a price tag roughly 30% higher than the 2025 baseline.

HP recently explained that RAM now accounts for about 35% of the cost required to build a brand-new PC. One of the world's largest OEM manufacturers plans to protect its margins by adopting a predefined optimization strategy. In the long run, customers will have to bear the supply chain burden as well. But the situation may get even worse.

Also read: The MacBook Neo is a $500 Wake-Up Call for the Entire PC Industry

TrendForce said that Intel has already raised prices on a few older, entry-level CPUs by more than 15%. The US chipmaker is also expected to increase prices for midrange and high-end computing platforms in the second quarter of the year. CPUs were already one of the largest cost factors in a notebook's BOM, and these increases could push manufacturers to raise final MSRPs even further.

But wait, there's more. TrendForce also highlights growing strain in CPU manufacturing ventures such as Intel and AMD. The supply chain is becoming unstable there as well, because corporations across the industry are prioritizing their business around Nvidia and Big Tech's plans to build massive AI data centers.

If both memory and CPU prices rise at the same time, TrendForce says a mainstream laptop could soon cost up to 40% more at retail. The question is whether CPU manufacturers will experience a boom similar to what memory makers are seeing, while many PC enthusiasts find themselves priced out of new hardware.

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Laptops could soon cost 40% more, and you already know why

 

[BitBot]

Screw this, I rather go back to my Core 2 Duo, than pay these prices.

 

[p51d007]

Bought a new laptop 9 months ago, new PC 2 years ago...I'm good.
Hope they drown in the surplus when the AI bubble breaks.

 

[Hecate91]

Thanks to AI, the mid range laptop market will be non-existent until the AI bubble pops, though I'm sure the RAM cartel will try to keep prices inflated.

 

[Hotdog1n]

NOOOOOOO SCREW YOU AI.
Seriously though.

 

[acrossthestars]

Contrary to what the "AI Hype Beasts" that seem to make up the majority of the stock market claim, the AI boom is not immune to the law of supply and demand. They will price the entire market out of itself, but they cannot sustain no customers and no revenue. VC money is not a perpetual money well. Furthermore, "record quarterly earnings" will stop, at some point.

AI does not produce "purchases". Which is to say, it doesn't use the things that it buys. If 5000 units of AR glasses are purchased @ $2,000 a pop, by a colony of bots and H1B visas from India (in order to astroturf sales), but 1% of them are used, then is that considered a "success" because the company made $10 million or a failure because nobody is using them? We're gonna have to start redefining the measure of a "successful launch", if "purchase volume" does not equal "revenue".

If everything becomes a subscription but there's no subscribers, then something went wrong. You can lie to the customers, but you can't lie to the investors. The numbers are what they are.

 

[jbright]

So let me get this straight. I can't afford a new laptop because Nvidia needs to simulate a billion more tokens per second to tell me my email "sounds great!" Cool cool cool.

 

[TooQik]

Unless something I currently own breaks, I can wait at least five years before I'm looking to upgrade/expand again.

 

[VitalyT]

 

[pnntmp]

It's funny how people (like the author of this article) are talking about "AI bubble" as if it were a thing, and expect that imaginary bubble to "finally burst".

AI will be more transformative than electricity. Could someone remind us when that electricity bubble burst?

 

[LordVile95]

It's funny how people (like the author of this article) are talking about "AI bubble" as if it were a thing, and expect that imaginary bubble to "finally burst".

AI will be more transformative than electricity. Could someone remind us when that electricity bubble burst?

AI is based heavily on speculation and companies racing to a product that does not and maybe will not exist. The vast majority of that investment is going straight down the drain

 

[Loadedaxe]

Contrary to what the "AI Hype Beasts" that seem to make up the majority of the stock market claim, the AI boom is not immune to the law of supply and demand. They will price the entire market out of itself, but they cannot sustain no customers and no revenue. VC money is not a perpetual money well. Furthermore, "record quarterly earnings" will stop, at some point.

AI does not produce "purchases". Which is to say, it doesn't use the things that it buys. If 5000 units of AR glasses are purchased @ $2,000 a pop, by a colony of bots and H1B visas from India (in order to astroturf sales), but 1% of them are used, then is that considered a "success" because the company made $10 million or a failure because nobody is using them? We're gonna have to start redefining the measure of a "successful launch", if "purchase volume" does not equal "revenue".

If everything becomes a subscription but there's no subscribers, then something went wrong. You can lie to the customers, but you can't lie to the investors. The numbers are what they are.

While I agree with your post mostly.

AI demand is hitting the same manufacturing bottlenecks as consumer hardware, advanced TSMC nodes, HBM memory, and advanced packaging like CoWoS.

When hyperscalers are buying accelerators that sell for tens of thousands each, it massively shifts where manufacturing capacity goes. GPU vendors and fabs will always prioritize the highest margin customers, which means consumer hardware gets pushed further down the line.

Even when AI spending eventually slows, pricing rarely returns to where it was before the boom. We already saw this with the crypto mining era, GPU prices and launch MSRPs permanently moved upward after Bitcoin and Ethereum demand exploded.

AI is likely to do the same thing to the broader PC hardware market, once companies prove customers will pay higher prices, those prices tend to stick even after the hype cycle cools.

We will never go back to the pricing we seen before the Ai boom as people have proven over and over, they will pay more at a much higher rate than ever before.

 

[Magneto1721]

Not just laptops, the datacenter buildouts and AI demand are driving up costs across the board. Try getting a quote on new enterprise server or storage equipment. In a number of cases we're seeing 50-80% cost increases.

 

[RudyBob]

I don't care what the costs are. You tech guys invented this and pushed for it, well now you got it.

 

[pnntmp]

AI is based heavily on speculation and companies racing to a product that does not and maybe will not exist. The vast majority of that investment is going straight down the drain

Looks like all the investors are wrong.
We are so lucky to have an expert like you among us.

 

[LordVile95]

Looks like all the investors are wrong.
We are so lucky to have an expert like you among us.

I mean did the 2008 and dot com crashes not happen? What happens for example when one company actually produces a valid product? What happens to every other company that’s had billions invested in it? What happens if the product emerges from china and all of the US investment is for nought? God forbid that there actually isn’t a profitable product at all and the entire sector has wasted hundreds of billions in search of a product they now can’t profit off of? The giants like Amazon, Google and Meta might be able to take the hit but very few others can. Then Nvidia and AMD tank because all that stock they took as payment for hardware is now a basically nothing and they’re taking billions of losses.

 

[OortCloud]

AI driving up prices of components and Agent Orange driving up prices of everything else with his tariffs and succession of wars to try and stop the world from finding out he's a raging paedophile. Fun times.

 

[pnntmp]

I mean did the 2008 and dot com crashes not happen? What happens for example when one company actually produces a valid product? What happens to every other company that’s had billions invested in it? What happens if the product emerges from china and all of the US investment is for nought? God forbid that there actually isn’t a profitable product at all and the entire sector has wasted hundreds of billions in search of a product they now can’t profit off of? The giants like Amazon, Google and Meta might be able to take the hit but very few others can. Then Nvidia and AMD tank because all that stock they took as payment for hardware is now a basically nothing and they’re taking billions of losses.

You seem to see this as some sort of a treasure hunt where one winner takes all, and everyone else loses everything and goes into bankruptcy. Needless to say, the real picture is entirely different. There are many companies that already produce amazing products used by millions. These millions get more and more by the day, while the products improve at a pace that's hard to even follow.There's no reason whatsoever for a crash.

 

[LordVile95]

You seem to see this as some sort of a treasure hunt where one winner takes all, and everyone else loses everything and goes into bankruptcy. Needless to say, the real picture is entirely different. There are many companies that already produce amazing products used by millions. These millions get more and more by the day, while the products improve at a pace that's hard to even follow.There's no reason whatsoever for a crash.

Which products are those, which ones anre actually useful rather than companies forcing their use to cut staff whilst worsening services and more importantly which of them are actually profitable.

 

[bviktor]

: D

Apple laughs in MacBook Neo.

 

[AlmightyLoaf]

Which products are those, which ones anre actually useful rather than companies forcing their use to cut staff whilst worsening services and more importantly which of them are actually profitable.

deafening silence

 

[Loadedaxe]

AI driving up prices of components and Agent Orange driving up prices of everything else with his tariffs and succession of wars to try and stop the world from finding out he's a raging paedophile. Fun times.

Ahhh there it is...piling on conspiracy claims and insults that don't really strengthen the argument here. You're just turning the conversation into noise instead of discussion. TDS at its finest.

Oh wait I forgot who I was talking to.

 

[OortCloud]

Ahhh there it is...piling on conspiracy claims and insults that don't really strengthen the argument here. You're just turning the conversation into noise instead of discussion. TDS at its finest.

Liars, Narcissists, Sex Offenders, Criminals and especially Kiddy Fiddlers tend to have that effect on me...

 

[Loadedaxe]

Liars, Narcissists, Sex Offenders, Criminals and especially Kiddy Fiddlers tend to have that effect on me...

100% agree, it has a affect on me as well, I just do not use as blanket statements on tech sites because "orange man bad".