If you have priced up new laptops for your team lately, you already know. The quote came back higher than last year, and the salesperson wanted a decision by Friday. It is not your imagination, and it is not a negotiating tactic. The cost of a new laptop is climbing fast, and refurbished laptops have quietly become the smartest hedge an IT budget can make.
Here is what is driving it. Artificial intelligence has created enormous demand for high-density memory, and data centres are buying it up faster than manufacturers can make it. That leaves the enterprise laptop market fighting over what is left. Gartner expects the combined price of DRAM and SSDs to rise by as much as 130% by the end of 2026, enough to lift average PC prices by around 17% and drag global PC shipments down more than 10%, the sharpest fall in over a decade. IDC has since revised its own forecast up to a matching 17%, from an earlier estimate of 8%. HP, Dell, Lenovo and others have already warned clients to expect increases of 15 to 20%.
The price of new is only going one way
None of this is a short-term blip. The memory shortage is structural, tied to a build-out of AI infrastructure that shows no sign of slowing. Some vendors are already shipping machines without the RAM installed, just to get a lower headline price on the page. If your refresh plan assumes new hardware costs what it did in 2024, that plan needs a rethink.
And there is a second pressure landing at exactly the same time.
The refresh wave is filling your store cupboards
When Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 last October, it set off the largest synchronised business hardware refresh in a decade. Canalys estimates that around 240 million PCs cannot meet Windows 11’s hardware requirements and are at risk of being scrapped, even though a huge share of them work perfectly well. So they get replaced, boxed up, and left to become someone’s problem later.
Put the two trends side by side and something obvious falls out. New kit has never been more expensive, and working kit has never been more plentiful.
Refurbished laptops dodge the spike
Buying refurbished sidesteps the price surge entirely. Enterprise-grade refurbished devices typically cost 30 to 50% less than the equivalent new machine, come with a warranty, and are ready for Windows 11. You get the performance your team needs without paying the AI premium baked into new hardware. The carbon maths stacks up too: building a single new laptop generates roughly 300kg of CO2 before it is even switched on. Reuse avoids nearly all of it.
And the kit you’re retiring is worth more than scrap
The devices leaving your estate are not waste. They are the exact machines someone else is desperate to get hold of. When you rehome your surplus instead of shredding it, a disposal line on a spreadsheet becomes carbon saved and a person connected. We know the numbers because we report them. For the Metropolitan Police, we securely processed 21,425 devices, prevented 16,243kg of e-waste, avoided 2.7 kilotonnes of CO2e, and put devices to work supporting vulnerable people across 32 London boroughs.
As the exclusive tech partner of the Good Things Foundation, we power the UK’s National Device Bank, and together we have committed to deliver 85,000 devices to digitally excluded people across the country. Every laptop you retire into that route is one less machine manufactured and one more person who can get online.
The market has handed IT leaders a rare alignment. For once, the cheaper option is also the greener one, and the one that changes a life. Buy refurbished. Rehome your surplus. If your organisation is refreshing this year, talk to us about where the old kit goes next. Old tech. New beginning.