A well-reviewed laptop got marked down this week for a reason that had nothing to do with the laptop. The Framework Laptop 13 Pro earned praise for its processor performance, its build quality, and its keyboard, and then lost points for price — with the review attributing the cost directly to high RAM prices. If you have been pricing a machine recently and wondering why the numbers look worse than they did a year ago, that is the explanation, and it is not going to reverse quickly.

Corporate laptop procurement has not kept pace with the changes in how knowledge workers use their devices. The procurement criteria that dominated enterprise laptop purchasing for the past fifteen years — Windows compatibility, Intel processor, specific RAM and storage tiers, corporate image support — are still driving purchasing decisions in organizations where the actual requirements have shifted materially. The mismatch produces laptops that are enterprise-manageable but mediocre for the work employees actually do.

The four-year PC refresh cycle that became standard in enterprise IT during the 2010s was a budget optimization made under specific conditions: hardware improvements were incremental, Windows 7 was stable, and the marginal productivity gain from newer hardware was not large enough to justify more frequent refresh. Those conditions no longer hold. The PC refresh cycle at many organizations has stretched to five, six, and in some cases seven years without a corresponding assessment of whether the extended cycle is actually saving money.