A stolen laptop used to be a headache. This year it is a budget problem.
The memory inside laptops and phones has repriced the device market. Everyday costs are still rising. And device theft is already hitting most organizations, especially where people work away from the office. Wait until a machine goes missing, and you pay twice: once for hardware that is harder to replace, and again for the data that left with it.
Memory got expensive, fast
This is not a slow, ordinary price cycle. TrendForce reported that global DRAM revenue reached $97 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 81 percent from the quarter before. The same firm projected that contract prices for general-purpose DRAM would rise another 58 to 63 percent in the second quarter.
Trade figures show the same squeeze. The Bank of Korea said DRAM export prices in July 2026 jumped 270.3 percent from a year earlier. For the first 20 days of August, Korea’s DRAM export unit price was up 401 percent from a year before, according to trade statistics reported by Chosun Biz.
Laptops, tablets, and phones all depend on that memory. When AI servers absorb the supply, the device on an employee’s desk costs more to buy and more to replace. A theft that was painful last year is a larger hole in the budget this year.
Inflation is the wider current
Chip prices are the sharp edge. Inflation is the current underneath them. The International Monetary Fund’s July 2026 outlook expects global headline inflation to rise from 4.1 percent in 2025 to 4.7 percent in 2026, led by energy and food. The OECD measured headline inflation at 4.3 percent in August 2026, up from 4.1 percent in July.
Budgets are already spoken for. A replacement laptop now competes with higher operating costs, not with last year’s spare room. Losing a device is no longer a line item most teams can absorb without noticing.
Theft is already common
The loss is not hypothetical. A Kensington survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers in the United States and Europe, published in April 2025, found that 76 percent had been hit by device theft in the previous two years. In the same research, 85 percent of organizations with flexible work reported theft, compared with 71 percent of organizations whose employees are fully onsite.
The bill does not stop when the hardware is gone:
- 46 percent reported a data breach or a loss of sensitive data tied to an unsecured device, according to Kensington’s summary of the study
- 33 percent faced legal or regulatory consequences
- 32 percent lost employee productivity
- 30 percent paid to replace devices
- 30 percent saw insurance costs rise after repeated theft
Phones leave the building every night. Laptops sit in cars, cafés, airports, and home offices. The more a device is worth, the more attractive it is to steal, and the more it costs when it does not come back.
The hardware is the smaller bill. The data on the device is the one you cannot put back on a purchase order.
About DriveStrike
DriveStrike is how you keep that data from leaving with the device. Locate, lock, wipe, and encryption management sit in one console, with mass deployment for phones, tablets, and computers on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and ChromeOS. If you want a walkthrough before you put it on the fleet, talk to the team.
What you can still control
You cannot set the price of memory. You can decide what happens in the first minutes after a laptop or phone goes missing.
DriveStrike is built for that moment, and for the ordinary days before it.
- Locate a missing laptop, tablet, or phone from one console
- Lock it so a stranger cannot keep using it
- Wipe company data if the device is not coming back
- Manage encryption, including BitLocker, so a stolen drive is not an open folder
- Geofence devices so action can start when they leave where they should be
- Cover the fleet across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and ChromeOS
- Deploy at scale, instead of protecting one machine at a time
That is the difference between hoping a laptop turns up and knowing the data on it is already locked down. HIPAA- and GDPR-aligned controls matter more when a missing device can become a reportable incident, not just a hardware ticket.
Do this before the next device walks out
Chip prices are still pointed up. Inflation has not given budgets a break. Theft is already a normal incident, not a rare one. The expensive mistake is waiting for the loss report before you can locate, lock, or wipe.
The devices still in your hands are the ones you can protect today. Thirty days is enough to put that control on the laptops and phones you would hate to lose.
Start Your Free 30 Day Trial
A missing laptop now costs more to replace, and the data on it can cost more than the hardware. Start a free DriveStrike trial and put locate, lock, wipe, and encryption control on the devices you cannot afford to lose.