Buying laptops and workstations in 2026, when memory is the expensive part
Between the RAM and NAND crunch and OEM price hikes, this is a genuinely bad year to buy computers. Some of you have to anyway. Here's how to spend sensibly, where the money actually goes, and why the part everyone worries about isn't the part that got expensive.
A lot of small businesses are being forced to buy computers right now, mostly because Windows 10 hit end of support last October and some machines simply can’t make the jump to Windows 11. The trouble is that 2026 is one of the worst hardware markets in years: RAM roughly doubled, SSDs got expensive too, GPUs are above list, and Dell, Lenovo, and HP have all pushed prices up 15 to 20 percent or more. You can’t time your way out of this, but you can avoid overpaying. Here’s how we’d think about it.
Where the money actually goes
People worry about the wrong component. The folk wisdom is “the motherboard is expensive” or “it’s the CPU.” It isn’t, this year. In a typical business PC or laptop, the parts that spiked are memory (roughly doubled at the chip level, worse at retail) and storage (up 50 percent and climbing). CPUs, motherboards, and the chassis are roughly flat.
That changes the shape of the decision. The price gap between an 8 GB / 256 GB machine and a 16 GB / 512 GB machine used to be small. Now it’s the biggest single lever on the sticker. And the OEMs know it, which is exactly why the default configuration you get for a given price keeps shrinking. The base model is the trap.
The rules we’d follow
Buy the RAM you need, not “future-proof” RAM. 16 GB is the sane floor for a business laptop in 2026. 32 GB only if someone actually runs virtual machines, giant spreadsheets, video, or design tools. The “get 32 GB just to be safe” reflex was cheap insurance when a kit cost $40. At $300 it’s a real expense, and the person you bought it for will use 9 GB of it.
Pay attention to soldered versus upgradeable memory. A thin-and-light with soldered 8 GB is a three-year machine you cannot fix when 8 GB stops being enough, which is roughly now. Fewer and fewer laptops have a RAM slot you can swap later; on the ones that matter to you, check. If it’s soldered, buy the configuration you’ll still be happy with in year three, because that’s the only configuration it will ever have.
Storage: 512 GB is the floor, but you don’t need 2 TB internal. 256 GB fills up faster than people expect once Windows, Office, Teams, and a year of downloads pile in. 512 GB is comfortable. Beyond that, external drives, a NAS, or cloud storage is cheaper per gigabyte even at today’s prices. Don’t pay spike prices for internal capacity you can add cheaply elsewhere.
Refurbished business hardware is the value play this year. Off-lease ThinkPad T and X series, Dell Latitude, HP EliteBook from roughly 2020 to 2022: they have TPM 2.0, they run Windows 11, they were built to be repaired, and crucially their prices did not spike the way new machines did. A three-year-old i5 with 16 GB and a 512 GB SSD for $300 to $450 is the best deal on the market right now, and it’s not close. For a lot of roles, that’s the right answer, full stop.
Stagger the purchases. Don’t refresh the whole office in one purchase order. Buy in waves, a few machines at a time. Prices move week to week, and there’s a chance (not a promise) of some easing later in the year. Buying everything on one bad day locks in that day’s prices for your entire fleet.
Lease or Cloud-PC the cases you can’t predict. If you genuinely don’t know your headcount six months out, a Windows 365 Cloud PC plus a cheap endpoint converts a capital purchase into a monthly line item and sidesteps the spec question entirely. It costs more over three years than owning, and it needs decent internet, but for the uncertain seats it’s a reasonable hedge.
On “AI PCs”
You’ll be offered a “Copilot+ PC” at a $200 to $300 premium over an otherwise-similar machine. These have a neural processing unit (an NPU) rated at 40 trillion operations per second or more, which unlocks on-device features: live transcription and translation, the Windows Studio camera effects, the local image tools, the much-debated Recall timeline, faster local search.
It’s real silicon doing real work. It is also irrelevant to most office jobs. If your day is a browser, email, Office, Teams, and a line-of-business web app, the NPU sits idle and you paid for features a small fraction of your team will ever open. Two caveats worth knowing: a chunk of laptops marketed as “AI PCs” have NPUs well under the 40-TOPS bar and don’t qualify as Copilot+ at all, so the badge isn’t the spec, and heavy on-device AI use drains the battery faster than the marketing implies.
The sane policy: buy the Copilot+ machine for the specific people who’d actually use it (heavy spreadsheet analysts, field staff who need offline transcription, anyone with a privacy reason to keep AI on-device) and buy a normal, cheaper machine for everyone else. Don’t fleet-buy the premium because it’s the new default in the catalogue.
Bottom line
This is a buy-what-you-need, buy-refurbished-where-you-can, stagger-it kind of year. The expensive parts are memory and storage, so that’s where to be disciplined: enough, not “to be safe” amounts. Refurbished business-grade machines dodge most of the price spike and run Windows 11 fine. And don’t let a vendor talk you into an AI-PC fleet or a 32 GB everything when 16 GB and a normal NPU is what the work actually calls for. The one thing not worth saving money on is staying on an unsupported operating system, so do leave Windows 10. Just be smart about what you replace it with.
If you’re planning a refresh and want help sizing what to buy (and what to redeploy instead of replacing), send us a note.