“Everybody’s Going to Have to Increase Prices”, Says ASUS Ahead of CES 2026

The air at CES 2026 is sure to feel a lot different from that in previous years. Not just because of mass layoffs, or the continued GenAI/AI push from nearly every major tech company. The memory shortage looms over everything, and its impact will continue to be felt worldwide, with prices likely to rise on all the products showcased in Las Vegas this year. It was pretty much all I could think about back on December 9, 2025, when ASUS invited Wccftech and other members of the media to a preview of what the company would be showing at CES 2026 in downtown Toronto.

There was a lot I got to see that day, and a few things that stood out. If you want to see what those were, you can check out my highlights round-up here.

It was intriguing to see what ASUS was putting forward for the new year, but it was difficult to look at anything with a significant level of excitement. With the way prices are going, when buying anything from the latest 2026 lineup of tech products, you’re either getting burned by overpaying now at launch, or you’re burned even more by overpaying later if the shortage issues don’t improve soon. Pricing was such a significant factor that when I got the chance to sit down and talk with Sascha Krohn, global director of technical marketing at ASUS, it was the first thing I wanted to address.

This was the second time this year I got to speak with Mr. Krohn, after first meeting him in October ahead of the launch for the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. You can check out that conversation if you like here, and while we did get to the new handheld, and other elements of ASUS’s CES 2026 lineup, the company’s AI messaging, and more, we began with what was, and what continues to be the topic of the day.

Author’s Note: This interview was conducted before ASUS announced it would be raising the prices on certain products, which is perhaps why Krohn answers the way he does when asked if ASUS will raise prices soon.

We’re hearing a lot about memory shortages lately. How much is this affecting ASUS on the manufacturing side, and are there certain products where you’re feeling the pressure more than others?

Sascha Krohn: Yeah, I don’t actually have any detailed insights into how we deal with our suppliers and how we allocate memory, but basically the way it happens is when you plan out a new product, whether it’s a laptop or a handheld, you do have a forecast for how many you think you’re going to sell over the lifetime of this product and how much per month, and then you do deals with suppliers. ‘I’m going to need this many panels in this month and this month and this quarter,’ and so on, and you kind of come to an agreement and make a deal about how much memory, how many panels you’re going to buy.

So to some degree, that helps to shield vendors from sudden changes in prices for components, but there’s always wiggle room, right? You never know exactly how many you’re going to sell, and you usually make like a deal for a certain quantity, but you’re probably going to need more, and then you just buy it, make additional deals later. I’m not really an expert in this, so I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I do know that we usually make these kinds of plans ahead of time, which kind of shields us to some degree, but yeah, it is going to affect us for sure. And I know that some of our competitors have already announced that they’re increasing prices.

I believe everybody’s going to have to increase prices. I think everything that has memory chips in it and flash memory chips in it is going to go up in price to some degree. How much is going to vary, but everything is going to increase in price, like consoles, phones, tablets. I think that’s just inevitable, and I think most people haven’t realized it because we all saw the news that memory chips went up in price, but then you see, ‘oh, but there’s still really good deals on laptops and gaming consoles and everything, and it hasn’t really changed all that much.’ That’s because it takes several months until that shockwave travels through the supply chain and hits all the manufacturers and hits all the retailers and e-tailers. So that is probably still going to happen.

So yeah, I think it’s going to affect everyone, but most companies are not talking about it for obvious reasons. I’m actually surprised that some of our competitors went out and announced it. I don’t know why they did that.

Is ASUS going to announce price increases soon? Are you expecting price changes on GPUs, laptops, or any of your product line?

I haven’t heard anything about this internally, so that would be something that would be, like, an official statement that travels through the company, and then we hear about it, and then we communicate it. I haven’t heard anything about that, but me personally, yes, I do expect that to happen.

“I think everything that has memory chips in it and flash memory chips in it is going to go up in price to some degree. How much is going to vary, but everything is going to increase in price, like consoles, phones, tablets. I think that’s just inevitable.”

Sascha Krohn, global director of technical marketing, ASUS

Have you been given a potential warning from other companies like NVIDIA that prices are going to go up for products that you collaborate on?

I haven’t heard anything about that, but if that happened, it would not be something that I would hear about right away, so, yeah, I haven’t heard anything about that.

Okay, but prices will be rising across the board?

That’s what I personally think. That’s not, like, an official company statement, but me personally, yes, based on my experience, you know, in the tech industry and based on what’s happening right now, that’s what I assume, yeah.

Do you think prices will stabilize soon? How long do you think it will take for them to stabilize?

I’ve been telling all my friends all the really good deals that happened lately for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that’s probably the best deals that they’ll be able to get for a while. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Like, I’m not an expert in this kind of stuff, but I do think it’s going to take a while until prices stabilize overall.

I mean, just like geopolitics, right? The world is overall, you know, going in a certain direction, and, yeah, I expect that prices are going to at least stay elevated.

What’s ‘a while?’

I really don’t know. I mean, I could only guess, and I don’t want to get into trouble for guessing something.

How has the launch of the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X been? Are you meeting expectations sales-wise, and can you share a global estimate of how many units of the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X have been sold?

That’s an easy question for me because I don’t have sales figures, so I don’t know. But I can tell you that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. People really love the ROG Xbox Ally X in particular, which I expected, and I’m not surprised about it at all. I actually think it was a really good and still is a really good price.

And I think the ROG Xbox Ally X even sold out in a couple of places, yeah? The demand for the ROG Xbox Ally X is much higher than we as a company anticipated. I personally, from the beginning, was like, this one is going to sell really well because there are a lot of people from the original Ally X who want to upgrade, and they’re going to upgrade to the ROG Xbox Ally X.

I wanted to ask about this tagline here, ‘AI: Always Incredible.’ What made you land on this for your new line of AI products?

Well, ‘Incredible’ is kind of like a word that our top management likes to use and we’ve used a lot over the years. We picked that because it’s, you know, together, when you use the two letters, it’s AI, always incredible. And that’s kind of like our strategy for AI. We want to get to the point that no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s on device or cloud or on the edge, like in between, you have a great AI experience no matter what you’re doing.

And we want to make it as seamless and as convenient as possible. The ultimate goal is very much like our Zen book. The idea is that technology just gets out of the way. There are a lot of concerns about AI and some people are really worried about AI and don’t like AI.

And there’s a lot of annoying stuff that is related to AI, but we also see it as a great enabler to make that happen, right? To get technology out of the way. Like this whole thing, I think there’s this saying that magic is technology that you don’t even notice that you’re interacting with, or something like that, you know? And that’s kind of, it feels like magic.

When technology works the way it should, it feels like magic. It just works, and it’s seamless. You don’t have to think about it, and you don’t have to figure out how to do it. You don’t have to learn how to tell your technology what you want, but your technology figures out what you want and does what you want. And AI has the biggest potential to make that a reality for a lot of cool features. So we are very excited about that as a company, and we’re leaning very heavily into that, into trying to work on as many AI solutions as possible and use AI to make everything as seamless as possible.

What do you think people should be taking away from the 2026 lineup of ASUS products? What is the best thing that ASUS is bringing to the market this year?

Oof, only one? I would say the ZenBook Duo. I think the ZenBook Duo 2026. I would pick the ZenBook Duo 2026 because it’s so refined, it’s so much better than the ZenBook Duo 2025, which is an awesome laptop and we’re still gonna sell it throughout the whole year. But the 2026 is so much more refined, lighter, longer battery life, more performance, better displays. It’s so much easier to set up.

You have the two displays so close to each other now. Yeah, I think that’s very refined, and it’s also very ASUS. I’m a big fan of the ZenBook Duo because I think for us as a company, what separates us from other brands is that we don’t have such a big risk aversion.

We’re willing to try out things even if there’s a high chance that it’s not going to work out. And ZenBook Duo is a perfect example. Every once in a while, or there’s a pretty big number, a pretty high percentage, it does work out, and we end up with something really cool, and then we keep refining it, and it ends up being this really unique product, and there’s nothing else like it on the market.

And we kind of created the Duo segment, and we own that segment, and there are other companies trying to enter that segment, and they’re failing; it doesn’t really work. So I think, yeah, the ZenBook Duo 2026 is like a perfect example of ASUS doing new things, being innovative, refining things and listening to customer feedback and creating products that people want that are maybe not for everyone but there are a lot of people who really want a product like this and they benefit from a product like this and most companies wouldn’t do it because it’s not something that everybody’s going to buy. You’re not going to sell the highest number of devices.

It’s not going to be a device like that. So if you only care about profits and you only care about market share, this is not necessarily something you do, but it’s something that ASUS does, and I think, yeah, ZenBook Duo 2026.

I would definitely agree that there are more than a few products ASUS make that are not things that everyone would do. The G1000, I think, falls into that same category. I heard outside that you can’t buy the chassis separately and then build your own PC inside?

Yes.

Why?

Well, the way we created this desktop was, okay, we want to make ready-made gaming desktops that are appealing to people, which is challenging because we are working with some awesome partners who are building systems like that already using our components, because we also have motherboards, VGAs and all these components. You can already build that.

Either there’s a big community of just end users who build those systems themselves, PC DIY, and there are system integrators, great partners we have, that build systems for people who just want to buy a ready-made system. So how do we compete with that? We don’t really want to compete with it. We want to add something else to it.

We want to bring something new to the market that is different, right? So we were thinking about how we can make a ready-made desktop that isn’t something that’s directly competing with people building their own PC or people buying something from a system integrator. And that’s what we came up with. We can do a different kind of case design that has a new way of doing system cooling, a better way of doing system cooling, and we wanted to do something that allows people to customize in a way that isn’t possible right now. And that’s kind of how we came up with the G1000 with the NME Holo and with the thermal atrium at the top for the all-in-one water cooler for the CPU.

So that’s kind of the whole idea behind it. If we were to sell that as a case, it would kind of defeat the purpose. I’m not saying we would never do it, but I don’t think that’s the plan right now.

For the Zephyrus line, ASUS has two 2026 models. They’re both on Intel now and not AMD, save for the third, hybrid 2025-2026 model. Where did the idea for the hybrid come from? Why keep the 2025 chassis and stick with AMD, and what prompted the move to Intel for the other two models?

The switch to Intel for 2026, it’s basically every time we come up with new devices, we think about ‘what’s our strategy,’ what’s our direction, what do we want to do with this device and in which direction do we want to go? Do we want to go for more performance, or longer battery life? What’s our strategy? And then we look at our silicon partners, what is their strategy, and what chips do they have available, right? Then, usually, stuff just very naturally evolves in, ‘okay, there’s going to be a chip that has this certain power envelope and certain performance and battery life focus, and this pretty much aligns with what we want to do for this chassis or for this device.’

And then we naturally just work together on having this silicon in this kind of device. But there is also a part of just strategy, where you also have to look into what’s the supply situation and who’s giving us a good deal and who’s maybe easy to work with and can guarantee us a certain supply or a certain price point or something like that. It all plays into it together. I think in the end, it was a decision made by both sides that it just makes sense to go for Panzer Lake with G14 and G16.

For the 2025 chassis refresh with an AMD 2026 CPU, I don’t know the story behind it, to be honest. I suspect that there was a demand for it, that there was interest from our sales to have that configuration for that price point.

I know that people are into conspiracy theories, and it’s crazy the kind of mind gymnastics some people do to come up with super complex theory to explain something that is pretty straightforward. Most of the time, it is boring, but the pretty straightforward part is: why are we doing something? It’s usually because people want to buy it. It’s boring, but that’s usually the answer.

How did the collaboration with Kojima Productions come about? How did that process go, did you work directly with Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa?

I wish I knew more about it, I don’t know all the backstory and all the details. Yes we worked on them directly with this, and yes the design is by both Yoji Shinkawa and Hideo Kojima. This is not something we did and proposed, and then they approved it like, ‘Yeah this kind of looks like what we do.’ This is a design from them and we worked very closely with them, but the exact process…I think that we approached them, but I don’t actually know for sure. For these kind of collaborations, it’s usually us approaching different artists we would like to collaborate with, and then we see how we could work together.

I think we try not to do too many of these projects at the same time; we usually do one per year, one every two years, it really depends. But I would love to see us do more collaborations with game publishers and developers.

Thank you so much for your time.

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