PCs have had a good year so far in terms of sales, following what was a dismal 2023. A new report shows that the positive outlook will grow even stronger heading into this holiday season for the PC industry.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the CTA (Consumer Technology Association) has just released a new analysis that reveals what people in the United States are planning to buy this holiday season — and apparently, it’s a whole lot of PCs and laptops.
A massive 51% of people surveyed said they were planning to buy a laptop as a gift this year, and 35% are planning to buy a desktop or PC. That’s up by close to 10% compared with last year.
Picking from one of the best laptops is also right at the top of the list of desired gifts, so it looks like there will be plenty of happy people this year. If we broaden the survey results, an estimated 233 million people are planning on buying some kind of tech as a gift this year.
The report shows data back to 2007 when the first iPhone was released, and that year just 46% of respondents planned to buy tech-related gifts, compared with 89% this year.
The CTA has speculated that the hype around AI PCs could have contributed to the growth between 2023 and 2024, though plenty of other studies have suggested that consumers don’t really care about AI right now and are just buying the latest PCs as part of the usual upgrade cycle. There’s also the Windows 10 end-of-life warning making an impact, as well as all the excitement around improved battery life coming from recent laptops.
The last big upgrade cycle hit at the start of the pandemic when everyone suddenly had to spend a lot more time at home, and four years later is about the right time for many people to be thinking about an upgrade.
The report got its data from 1,205 adults in the United States from August 27 to September 4, which also shows just how early in the year people start thinking about holiday gifts. Other popular tech gifts for the year include tablets (55%), webcams (26%), printers (35%), and Wi-Fi mesh routers (31%).
As for the most-wanted gifts, the top position goes to laptops, followed by tablets, smartphones, wearables, and gaming consoles. As you might expect, people are generally buying these gifts either for children under 18 or their spouses — so don’t expect to receive a laptop from your colleague or friend.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).