According to the latest research from Omdia, total shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations in the first quarter of 2026 increased by 3.2% year-over-year to 64.8 million units. Notebooks (including mobile workstations) saw a modest year-over-year increase of 2.6% in the first quarter to 50.8 million units. And it’s good news for Apple.
According to Omdia, Mac sales grew 10.7% year-over-year. Apple sold 7.1 million Macs in the first quarter of 2026 for 11% global PC market share. That compares to sales of 6.8 million in the first quarter of 2025 and 10.7% market share.
Apple is in fourth place among global PC vendors. Ahead of it are Lenovo (25.5% market share), HP (18.7% market share), and Dell (15.9% market share). Note that Omdia doesn’t count tablets such as the iPad as a personal computer.
This is the good news. The outlook is a bit bleaker.
“With supply-chain pressures still building, Q1’s modest growth is likely to mark the high point for the year,” said Ben Yeh, principal analyst at Omdia. “Memory and storage costs are expected to rise further and more steeply than previously assumed from quarter two, squeezing PC vendor gross margins and forcing them to pass costs through to channel partners and end-customers. AI data center build-outs are crowding consumer categories out of memory and storage supply, which have already seen roughly five-fold and three-fold cost increases respectively since quarter one of 2025. CPU prices are a smaller but compounding pressure, with Intel and AMD projecting increases of 10-25% into the second quarter.”
With costs set to rise across the bill of materials, vendors have every incentive to protect shipments, revenue and gross margin by pulling deliveries forward, and Omdia’s regional analysis is consistent with that behavior across most of the first quarter. Preliminary regional data suggest that channel partners in North America have already absorbed as much as they can before end‑user prices rise.
In Japan, the market has begun to show a more pronounced downturn, weighed down by the high shipment volume base in the first quarter of 25 and by more severe cost and component supply pressures in the education segment. Given the education-driven surge throughout 2025, fading policy momentum could also become one of the main drivers of contraction in 2026, per Omdia.
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