Tom Mainelli

I think what you're going to see, there's going to be a few impacts of the rising cost of memory.

For one, the larger PC vendors, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Apple.

will be in a better position than smaller players.

And so there are lots of regional PC vendors.

There are still plenty of mom and pop companies that build desktop computers for small businesses.

Those smaller companies are going to really be challenged, not only in terms of their ability to pay the higher prices, but even to get allocations.

So one thing we think will happen over the course of 26 is there will be some share shifts and likely the larger players will get larger and some smaller players will get smaller or maybe even exit these markets.

We will see price increases.

We will see some vendors to account for the RAM.

They buy a less powerful CPU or they spend less money on the various other features that go into a device.

And so consumers may be faced with making some choices around the capabilities that they buy.

And they may find themselves waiting in line in some cases to buy a PC as the volume go down as companies fight over the allocations of memory.

Yeah, they are going to be hard hit because the smaller players are not operating at the same scale of a Dell or an HP or Lenovo.

And gamers like powerful PCs.

They want a powerful CPU and they want plenty of memory.

One of the interesting, I guess, perfect storm elements of this memory issue is that there's been a push in the PC industry towards the AI PC.

IDC defines AI PC as a PC that has an NPU, a neural processing unit that's designed to run AI workloads.

One of the other things that an AI PC needs is memory.

The more memory, the better.

As the industry has moved towards pushing the AI PC, sort of a minimum spec, certainly for a Copilot Plus PC from Microsoft, is 16 gigs of RAM.