PC prices were a mystery at CES 2026 as RAM costs spark chaos

Skyrocketing RAM prices are confusing the entire industry

RAM prices are skyrocketing. Some stores are even selling it at “market price,” like it’s lobster or something. Rising memory prices also mean that SSD prices are up, although less dramatically. Research firm IDC expects PC prices to increase by 20 percent in 2026.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air and no one wants to announce prices because of it. For one thing, it’s unclear how expensive RAM is going to be in the months ahead. But also, I feel like no manufacturer wants to go first—if you announce a price, your competitor can use that to undercut you. PC manufacturers are figuring out how to spread price increases across their hardware lineup, too.

When I talk to people about pricing, they all shrug and say the RAM situation is chaotic. No one knows exactly how it will affect PC prices.

The tariff story no one wants to talk about

The PC industry suffered through quite the mess last year. PC manufacturers announced a lot of pricing prior to the unveiling of the tariffs—and then they had to walk it all back.

In early 2025, I had one PC manufacturer tell me, point blank, that a laptop’s MSRP had gone up by $200 due to tariffs. After that, everyone was extremely quiet. Many PCs arrived with higher than expected prices. In 2025, I reviewed a lot of budget laptops that felt like they had a few too many corners cut for their retail prices. PC manufacturers moved manufacturing between countries to minimize the impact of tariffs.

This week, the US Supreme Court is expected to rule on tariffs. It’s unclear what the ruling will be and what its effects will be. Who wants to announce pricing before the dust settles on that?

Here’s another story that people rarely talk about when it comes to PC pricing: the US dollar had a big decline in 2025, falling 9 percent against other major currencies. If you’re setting PC hardware prices in dollars and those dollars are falling against other currencies, that’s a big factor.

These PCs weren’t designed for this chaotic RAM market

It takes a significant amount of time to design and manufacture a PC or any other kind of hardware device. Truth is, the hardware being shown off by PC manufacturers at CES 2026 was designed for a different world—one where RAM and SSD prices remained stable.

In an alternate world where RAM prices were knowingly headed for the moon, Microsoft may have spent the last few years optimizing Windows 11 to work well with 8GB of RAM rather than setting 16GB as the de facto standard with its Copilot+ PC requirements. We’d probably see fewer premium laptops with 32GB of RAM, which is often unnecessary for many workloads but desirable for manufacturers who want to include it as a flex to sell higher-spec models.

We might’ve also seen more user-upgradeable RAM on laptops. This is a feature that’s often confined to business laptops, some gaming laptops, and tinkerer-friendly hardware like the Framework laptops.

Instead, 2025 saw a lot of laptops with non-user-upgradeable RAM. Intel integrated RAM into Lunar Lake’s SoC design, and many laptop manufacturers stuck with soldered RAM that wasn’t user-upgradeable.

The future of PCs may be operating systems that are more efficient with RAM, more hardware that gives users the ability to easily upgrade, and—unfortunately—higher prices all around.

Do MSRPs mean anything in 2026?

The fixed “manufacturer suggested retail price” may not make sense anymore in 2026. It already didn’t make much sense in 2025.

RAM is just the latest chaotic element here. The forces of supply and demand are at work in the component market, and the industry is buying up so much memory for AI data centers that consumers and the PC industry are no longer the priority. That’s why Crucial stopped selling RAM to consumers and focused on data centers instead.

The idea that a PC manufacturer could set a fixed price for hardware when manufacturing and import costs are in such flux may be outdated now. For example, Microsoft keeps raising Xbox hardware prices. Instead of an MSRP that drops, as in previous hardware generations, we’re now seeing MSRPs that increase over time for a wide variety of reasons that all keep driving costs up. Companies like CyberPowerPC have raised prices in response to RAM costs going up, too.

There’s still value to be found

Hardware prices are going up. While that sucks, it’s not a reason to avoid purchasing a machine you really love. People often talk about investing in quality items that really matter, like a good pair of shoes or a mattress. I’d say the same for laptops and PCs: if you use it a lot, you should prioritize your PC and get something you’re really happy with.

If you’re looking for value, it’s still out there. Despite the fact that RAM prices are up, there are still lots of great deals you can find on laptops and pre-built desktop PCs. The same will likely be true for next-generation hardware… if you can wait.

I’m thankful there’s still a PC industry making awesome products, even if some manufacturers like Crucial are pulling out of it. At least Nvidia still makes consumer GPUs, even if they just had software advances like a new version of DLSS to unveil this year.

I look forward to hearing more about the pricing on these machines and peripherals in the months ahead. I’m just not hearing much about it on the ground at CES 2026.

Further reading: The best of CES 2026 and what blew us away