The majority of PCs that commercial resellers shipped to enterprise customers in Q4 were AI-capable, however, it was the traditional levers of price, battery life and performance these biz buyers were mostly sold on.
Some 54 percent of laptops shipped from distributors to their UK customers in the final three months of 2025 contained a neural processing unit, and a quarter of these were deemed next-generation AI hardware, ie, ones that are based on NPUs with 40+ TOPs.
Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?
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Generating more than a passing interest in these devices is taking longer than PC makers hoped for or forecast, and this is due to relatively high prices and a lack of killer apps. On-device AI processing just isn’t tempting for many office workers. But vendors are keen to promote them because they promised higher margins.
Marie-Christine Pygott, senior analyst at Context, which compiled the stats, said prices are deflating in the business space. The average UK sales price dropped year-on-year to a little more £1,000 (c $1,300) in Q4, down almost 7 percent.
She told The Register:
“We are seeing two main sweet spots in UK distribution, at GBP900 and GBP1,100, both driven by Microsoft’s Surface Pro (other OEMs have seen their sales go up but Microsoft is still the leading OEM for next-gen AI notebooks in the UK.”
Dell, HP, and Lenovo were all rubbing their hands together in late 2024 in anticipation of AI PCs coming onto the scene and enterprise customers starting to migrate from Windows 10 devices before support ended. Neither of these levers helped move product at the pace expected.
In the nine months ended October 31, 2025, Dell reported an 11 percent decline in consumer PCs and a 5 percent rise in commercial. More recently, chief operating officer Jeff Clarke admitted at CES in Las Vegas that Dell had “got a bit off course” by focusing more on the premium end of the commercial PC market.
It didn’t help that Dell phased out its XPS line – it is now reviving the brand. “I owe you an apology. We didn’t listen to you. You were right on branding,” Clarke said.
Pygott told The Reg the “lack of a killer app” remains a problem for AI PC vendors, “but we are finding that the messages are shifting more to the overall package now – so rather than ‘just’ focusing on AI capabilities, the message is about battery life, performance, best product for the task, future-proofing, and AI.”
Memory shortage could push PC shipments to pre-pandemic lows
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Lenovo is pinning the use of agentic AI on driving sales of computers. They are designed to perform tasks, automate workflows and offer personalized assistance locally on the device.
Taking a glass half-full approach, Pygott said: “There is a chance the on-device AI message will gain in importance again if and when we all start using agentic AI and devices ‘learn’ about us. Or of course if that killer app eventually comes along.”
The main challenge for PC makers in 2026, however, is related to memory prices. This is ironically due to AI, as demand for HBM in high performance server and GPUs deployed in AI datacenter leads to shortages of DRAM as production is prioritized to premium components.