The cheapest computer you will buy for the next two years might be the one already sitting on your desk. That is the uncomfortable math behind a wave of hardware price hikes rolling across Apple, Microsoft, and Valve in mid-2026, and it is reviving a very old idea: stop buying new, and fix what you have.
The phrase doing the rounds is “make do and mend,” borrowed from a British wartime campaign that taught households to repair clothes instead of replacing them. Applied to gadgets in 2026, it is less nostalgia and more arithmetic. When the cost of a new device jumps and the cost of keeping an old one running stays flat, the spread does the persuading.
Make Do and Mend (tech context) A consumer and business response to rising hardware prices in which buyers extend the life of existing devices through repair, component upgrades, and certified refurbished purchases rather than buying new. The driver is economic, not sentimental: when new-device prices rise faster than repair costs, repair becomes the rational default.
The root cause is memory, not greed
It is tempting to read price hikes as corporate opportunism. The more boring and more accurate explanation is a global shortage of memory chips, and it traces back to AI.
The world’s three big memory makers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, control over 95% of DRAM production. Through 2025 and into 2026 they redirected the bulk of their capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the expensive stuff that feeds AI data centers, because the margins are several times higher than ordinary consumer RAM. A wafer turned into HBM for an Nvidia accelerator is a wafer not turned into the RAM in your laptop. That is the whole story in one sentence.
The result was a price move that startled even the analysts who track it for a living.
DRAM prices rose roughly 172% across 2025, then jumped a further 90% quarter-over-quarter in early 2026. HP told investors that memory leapt from 15-18% of the cost of building a PC to about 35% in a single quarter. None of that is a pricing decision a hardware company makes for fun. It is a cost it either eats or passes on, and most are passing it on.
What actually got more expensive
The hikes are not subtle, and they are not confined to one brand.
| Product | Price move | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Apple hardware | Increases across iPads, Macs, HomePod, Vision Pro, Apple TV | Announced June 25, 2026; Apple stock fell over 6% on the day |
| Xbox Series X (1TB) | Up around $150 | Microsoft cited component costs |
| Microsoft Surface laptops | Up to $600 more | Hits the higher-spec configurations hardest |
| Valve Steam Machine | $1,049 without a controller | Valve said the figure exceeded what it wanted to charge |
Apple is the tell here. It had long-term memory supply locked in through early 2026 and was widely seen as insulated. Once that cover ran out, it raised prices anyway and the market punished the stock immediately. When the best-hedged company in consumer tech cannot hold the line, the squeeze is real.
The part the price tags hide
Here is the strategic point most coverage skips. If buyers simply absorb these higher prices, the prices are far less likely to fall back when the AI capital-spending boom eventually cools. Companies anchor to whatever the market tolerates. Quiet acceptance sets the new floor.
That is why the “make do and mend” framing is more than a frugality tip. Collective restraint is the only real pressure consumers can apply on pricing they did not cause and cannot negotiate. Whether enough people coordinate to matter is doubtful, but the individual logic holds regardless of what everyone else does.
The repair and refurb math
For most people, “mend” splits into three practical moves, in rough order of cost.
| Strategy | Typical cost vs new | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Repair the device you own | Lowest; often a single part | A working device with one failed component (battery, screen, backlight) |
| Buy certified refurbished | 15-40% below new | Replacing a device that is genuinely dead or obsolete |
| Component upgrade | Varies | Extending a PC’s useful life with more RAM or storage, though those parts are also pricier now |
The refurbished market was already growing before this shortage handed it a tailwind. The used and refurbished smartphone segment alone runs around $65 to $70 billion globally and is expanding at a high-single-digit annual rate. A quick caveat worth stating plainly: broader “refurbished electronics” market estimates range wildly across research firms, from the low tens of billions to nearly $300 billion depending on what gets counted, so treat any single headline number with suspicion. The direction of travel, though, is not in dispute. Higher new-device prices push demand toward used and certified pre-owned hardware, and the resellers know it.
Regulation is quietly helping
Repair used to mean fighting the manufacturer. That is slowly changing, which matters because it lowers the cost and friction of the “mend” option exactly when the economics favor it.
Two developments stand out. Oregon became the first US state to ban “parts pairing,” the practice of locking a device to its original components so third-party replacements stop working. And in the European Union, devices sold after February 18, 2027, must have easily replaceable batteries, a rule that quietly extends the usable life of phones and laptops by years.
These are not consumer-hostile companies suddenly finding generosity. They are regulators forcing repairability that the industry spent years engineering out of its products. The shortage simply makes the regulation more valuable than it looked when it passed.
What this means if you run a business
For operators, the takeaway is not “tell staff to fix their own laptops.” It is a procurement and timing question.
First, refresh cycles are now a real budget lever. Pushing a fleet refresh from a three-year to a four-year cycle avoids buying hardware at the worst possible moment. Second, certified refurbished and corporate trade-in channels are no longer a fringe option; enterprise refurbished adoption is climbing precisely because the math now works at scale. Third, if you sell physical product with memory or storage inside it, your bill of materials moved against you, and “wait for prices to normalize” is not a strategy when analysts broadly expect tight supply into 2027 and possibly 2028.
The companies that planned for this, like the ones that stockpiled memory inventory ahead of the spike, are buying themselves a pricing cushion. The ones that did not are about to learn what their supply chain assumptions were really worth.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The “make do and mend” revival is the right instinct attached to a slightly romantic story. Nobody is going to out-stubborn three memory giants and a trillion dollars of AI capital spending through collective thrift. The shortage will resolve when new fab capacity arrives in 2027 and 2028, not because consumers held the line.
But the individual economics are airtight, and that is what actually moves markets. When a new device costs more and your old one works fine, repair wins on a spreadsheet, no ideology required. The smart money here is not betting on a consumer boycott. It is the refurbished resellers, the independent repair shops, and the right-to-repair regulators who spent years building the infrastructure for a moment exactly like this one. The shortage did not create the repair economy. It just made it the obvious choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are computer and phone prices going up in 2026?
The main driver is a global shortage of memory chips (DRAM and NAND). Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted most of their production toward high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers, which carries much higher margins. That leaves less capacity for the ordinary RAM and storage used in consumer devices, pushing prices up across phones, laptops, and consoles.
How much have memory prices actually risen?
DRAM prices rose roughly 172% across 2025 and a further 90% quarter-over-quarter in early 2026. HP disclosed that memory went from 15-18% of the cost of building a PC to around 35% in a single quarter.
When will tech prices come back down?
Most analysts expect memory supply to stay tight into 2027, with some forecasting relief only in 2028, once new factory capacity comes online. Because companies tend to anchor to whatever prices the market accepts, some of these increases may not fully reverse even after supply recovers.
Is buying refurbished electronics worth it right now?
For many buyers, yes. Certified refurbished devices typically sell 15-40% below new prices, and that gap is more attractive while new-device prices are rising. Look for sellers offering warranties and clear grading, since quality consistency is the main risk with refurbished hardware.
What is “make do and mend” in the context of technology?
It describes choosing to repair, upgrade, or buy used hardware instead of replacing it with new devices, driven by rising prices. The logic is purely economic: when keeping an old device running costs less than buying new, repair becomes the rational default.
