Somebody buys the laptop. Through an employer of record it is usually the provider. Through a contractor it is usually them, with the cost buried in their rate. The device is the one line in an offshore hire's cost that most Australian founders never price, and it is the line that moved this year.
On 16 September TrendForce put global data centre power demand capacity at 161 GW for 2026, up about 31 percent year on year, with AI servers taking 33.4 percent of it against nearly 25 percent in 2025. The build-out is not a spike working its way through. It is a standing bid, and it has been bidding against you in the component market for a year.
Outstaffer supplies and manages the machine, so read what follows as a disclosure of interest rather than neutral reporting.
The laptop stopped being a rounding error
IDC's forecast, published on 2 June, cut 2026 global PC shipments by 11.3 percent and put average selling price growth at 17 percent for the year. Its analysts wrote that pricing is unlikely to return to 2025 levels, with no relief before the end of 2027. IDC attributes the squeeze to AI infrastructure pulling memory production toward server parts and away from consumer devices.
Seventeen percent on one machine is a shrug. On a fleet it compounds.
How much does seventeen percent actually cost you?
Take a twelve-person team on a three-year refresh cycle. Four machines come up this year, and at 17 percent higher average prices those four cost roughly what 4.7 cost last year. You have paid for most of a fifth device and received nothing. Hire three more people and the premium lands three more times, as capital expenditure, in the month each starts and before any has billed an hour. Deferring is not the escape it looks like, because IDC's answer is that the price does not come back down.
Who provides the device also decides who can wipe it
Who provides the laptop when I hire someone offshore?
Under a contractor arrangement, they do. Virtual Coworker says so in its FAQ: "All independent contractors are required to have a professional home office set-up", including a modern, up-to-date computer. Honest, clear, and it hands you the 17 percent back.
It also puts your client data on a machine you have never seen, cannot patch, cannot lock and cannot get back.
Outstaffer's device service remotely locks or wipes a lost machine and wipes data before collecting an outgoing employee's device, to the NIST SP 800-88 r1 standard. Shipping laptops to offshore staff runs through DHL with loss and damage cover. None of that reaches a computer somebody else owns, which is why what an offshore hire actually costs once compliance and equipment are counted is a different number from the salary.
There is a second cost. Telling a contractor which computer to buy and which monitoring to accept starts to look like direction, and direction is what the control test that decides whether they are really a contractor weighs. Get advice on your own arrangement before you rely on the label.
The honest counter, and where it stops working
Most of this is noise. A few hundred dollars against a salary in the tens of thousands does not decide a hire, plenty of businesses have run contractor laptops for years without losing a byte, and the people making the security argument loudest usually sell hardware.
That holds right up to the day someone resigns badly. Recovering company laptops when an offshore hire leaves is not a percentage problem. It is the whole machine and everything on it, and you learn which arrangement you chose on the worst morning available.
Related reading
What I would do about the next three hires
Buy the machine, own the machine, and stop treating it as stationery. The 17 percent is spent by the time you notice. The control is the part you can still choose, and it is worth more than the saving.
If you want the real number for a role, sign up and price one with the device, the compliance and the management fee in one figure. Then decide who provides the laptop deliberately rather than by default.
What would it cost you today to get a laptop back from someone who did not want to return it?
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