A small business owner walked into an electronics store around 2018 and walked out with a business-grade laptop for $499. Six years and a global chip shortage and an AI arms race later, that same shopping trip does not exist. The $499 laptop is either a consumer machine that will not last three years, an older model with a Windows 11 upgrade path that ends soon, or something the manufacturer is quietly clearing out because the components that replaced it cost more.
Every SMB owner sitting on aging workstations, waiting for prices to come back down, is running the wrong strategy. SMB hardware costs are going up, not down, and the drivers pushing them up have long timelines. Waiting is not saving money. Waiting is guaranteeing the next refresh happens at a higher price under worse conditions.
What Actually Changed in SMB Hardware Costs
Three forces are moving PC prices in the same direction, all at once.
Memory is expensive again, and it is not coming back down soon. DRAM and NAND flash prices have surged through 2026 because AI infrastructure buildouts are absorbing enormous quantities of the same chips your business laptop needs. TrendForce projects conventional DRAM contract prices rising 13 to 18 percent quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2026, with NAND up 10 to 15 percent, and calls AI server demand the dominant factor keeping supply constrained.1 UBS analyst forecasts run higher, projecting DDR contract prices up 32 percent QoQ in Q3 2026, roughly double their earlier estimates. The demand-supply gap that industry researchers are pricing for 2027 is the widest in a decade.
OEMs are passing the cost through. Dell Technologies confirmed in December 2025 that commercial laptop, desktop, and monitor pricing would rise 10 to 30 percent depending on configuration, effective December 17, 2025, citing AI-driven memory shortages and macroeconomic pressure. Lenovo followed the same month, telling channel partners that current quotes expire January 1 and that all commercial pricing rises in early 2026. HP CEO Enrique Lores has told analysts memory represents roughly 15 to 18 percent of total PC cost and additional adjustments are likely in the second half of 2026.2
Windows 11 raised the hardware floor. Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 chip, secure boot, a supported CPU generation, and a minimum of 4 GB of RAM for the operating system alone. In practice, any workstation running modern business software also needs 16 GB. The 4 GB bargain-basement machine is not eligible for Windows 11 at all. Windows 10 mainstream support ended in October 2025, which means the older machines still in service are running on time nobody at Microsoft is paying to secure.
Put those three together. Memory expensive. OEMs raising prices. The floor for a supported Windows 11 machine sits higher than the ceiling for what a bargain-basement machine used to cost. That is the environment SMB owners are refreshing hardware in for the foreseeable future.
Why Waiting Is Losing Money
The rising floor of SMB hardware costs is not something owners can wait out. The instinct many SMB owners have is to defer the refresh. Wait a year. Prices will come down. That instinct made sense when the PC market ran on a steady march toward cheaper components and faster processors. It does not make sense in a market where memory alone is up double-digit percentages every quarter, where the OEMs are actively raising list prices, and where the machines available at the low end of the market are not eligible for the current operating system.
Waiting also compounds other costs. A workstation past its warranty is a workstation your MSP is billing time against for every failure. A workstation on Windows 10 after end of support is a compliance problem for your cyber insurance renewal. A workstation on 8 GB of RAM cannot run the software your team actually opens every day. Every one of those is a real, monthly cost your accounting statement is already carrying, just not in the line item labeled “hardware.”
The math changed. In 2018 the delay strategy saved you $80 per machine per year of waiting. In 2026 it costs you more than it saves, because the machine you would have bought last year is priced higher this year and the machine you have today is generating support tickets and security exposure while you decide.
What a Real Hardware Forecast Looks Like
The real conversation about SMB hardware costs starts with a plan, not a spot quote. Your MSP or your vCIO should be handing you a rolling 24 to 36 month hardware refresh plan. Not a wish list. A forecast with dates, quantities, unit costs, and a budget cadence you can hand to your CFO. Real forecasts include four elements.
An asset register with age and warranty status so you know what is aging out of coverage, what falls out of Windows 11 eligibility, and what the manufacturer has stopped supporting.
A refresh cadence tied to business risk, not calendar year. Machines that touch payment data, patient records, or executive email refresh on tighter cadences than machines that run one line-of-business application in a warehouse.
Unit cost trajectories, not spot prices. The number in the forecast is the price you can budget against with a small buffer, updated every quarter as the market moves. A refresh budget built on last quarter’s spot price is already wrong.
Lifecycle disposition. Where the old machines go, how they get wiped, what evidence you receive that data was destroyed. Not an afterthought. A documented step.
What the Right Hardware Conversation Sounds Like Now
SMB hardware costs are climbing on structural drivers, not cyclical ones. SMB hardware costs will keep the direction they are moving until AI infrastructure demand cools, and that is not the horizon anyone is forecasting. Anyone telling you to wait for prices to fall is telling you what you want to hear, not what the market is doing.
The right conversation with your MSP right now sounds like this. Which of my machines fall out of Windows 11 eligibility or warranty in the next 12 months? What is a realistic budget for replacements at 2026 prices? What is the total cost of ownership over five years for a properly specified business workstation, and how does that compare to keeping the aging one on the network? Which vendor stack are we standardizing on, and why?
The MSP that treats hardware as a strategic input to your business, not a purchasing headache to defer, gives you those answers with numbers, dates, and quantities. Everyone else hands you a quote when the machine fails, and hopes you do not notice how much it went up.
Where This Leaves You
The $500 workstation is gone. It was a moment in time, not a permanent condition, and the moment ended somewhere between the pandemic supply shocks and the AI data center buildout. What replaced it is a market where properly specified business hardware costs more than it did five years ago, keeps costing more each quarter, and does not reward the strategy of waiting.
The businesses that will keep operating smoothly through the next three years are the ones that built the refresh cadence into their budgeting and stopped hoping the market would come back to them. It will not. Your MSP knows this. Your MSP should be telling you this. If they are not, that is the first conversation to have this week.
Sources
1 TrendForce, “AI Server Demand Continues to Support Memory Prices in 3Q26,” trendforce.com, July 3, 2026.
2 Yahoo Finance, “Dell confirms major cost increases across enterprise laptops,” finance.yahoo.com, December 2025.
About Brent Lacy: Brent Lacy has been in the IT industry since 1997. He moved into the managed services world around 2015 and was doing vCIO work before the title even existed. He writes about the operational discipline, trust-based relationships, and strategic thinking that separate MSPs built to last from those built to bill. He is the author of Rewired MSP: Mastery, Scalability and Performance, vCIO Rewired: Virtually Conquering IT Obstacles, and Near Miss: Preventable IT Failures Threatening Your Business Security.
