The laptop you put off buying just got harder to justify. Gartner says worldwide PC shipments fell to 55.4 million units in the third quarter, a 22.4 percent drop from a year earlier.
Namrata Banerjee, a principal at Gartner, says DRAM costs surged five times from a year earlier in the second quarter and vendors passed that increase on, so lower-cost PCs got scarce and a replacement got harder to afford. Businesses, she says, put spending into workstations and AI PCs instead of replacing machines across the board. An independent IDC count, via Ars Technica, puts the same quarter at a 20.1 percent drop, to 62.7 million units. IDC says channel promotions may bring some short-term relief, though prices will stay elevated.
Next year's supply is already mostly spoken for. KED Global says Samsung has long-term supply agreements covering about 75 to 80 percent of its planned memory output for next year, with Nvidia, Google and Microsoft among the buyers seeking supplies for five years or more. The laptop or phone you were going to buy has to come from what those agreements don't take.
Microsoft, one of those buyers, is chasing efficiency because power is the other constraint. It says Maia will become the primary inference system for its own products and services, with Maia 300 production deployments starting in 2027, and it expects Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems.
Investors are already balking at what a new AI data center is worth. The Guardian says Nvidia-backed Firmus pulled its planned ASX listing after demand for the AI data-center business failed to materialize and investors doubted the valuation, and the company says it will look to private markets instead.
A gadget that lives in the cloud still depends on a building. The Record reports that Ukrainian drones hit a third Yandex data center, this one in Vladimir, overnight Sunday and shut it down, disrupting Yandex Cloud, payments and deliveries. Alice and some connected smart-home devices reportedly stopped working in some homes.
If you'd rather keep what you have, the useful part of the week is an update. Stable Nothing OS 5.0, built on Android 17, is rolling out to the Nothing Phone (3), staggered by region, and Android Authority says it's the company's first phone on Android 17. On that phone, go to Settings, then System, then System update.
If your laptop or phone still works, install the updates it's getting and hold off on replacing it. If you have to buy this fall, watch for the promotions IDC expects, but don't wait for last year's prices to come back.
Photo: D-Kuru / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
