Quick answer
Companies are keeping PCs a year or more longer than planned because memory chip prices spiked in 2026 — and most IT teams have no way to see what that extra year does to performance until someone complains.
- Combined DRAM and SSD prices are projected to surge up to 130% by the end of 2026, pushing average PC prices up 17%
- Gartner expects average business PC lifespans to stretch 15% longer as a direct result
- Employee happiness with laptops turned negative for the first time in five years, and lost time is already climbing
Every finance team is telling IT the same thing this year: hold onto the laptops a little longer.
It is a reasonable instruction. Memory prices have risen so fast that replacing a fleet on schedule now costs meaningfully more than it did twelve months ago.
So the replacement cycle stretches. Three years becomes three and a half. Four becomes closer to five.
Nobody signs off on that decision explicitly. It happens one deferred purchase order at a time.
What rarely gets asked is what an extra year of use actually does to the machines that stay in service — and whether anyone would notice before it started costing more than the new PCs would have.
Why the replacement clock stopped
The trigger is a memory shortage, not a budget cut. AI infrastructure and consumer PCs are competing for the same DRAM and NAND flash production capacity, and prices have moved accordingly.
Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD prices to surge by as much as 130% by the end of 2026, pushing average PC prices up 17% compared with 2025.
The direct consequence for IT: Gartner forecasts the average PC lifespan for business buyers to increase 15% by the end of the year, as organizations delay refreshes to absorb the cost.
What an extra year on a laptop actually costs
Extending a lifecycle is a financial decision. What happens next is an operational one, and it rarely gets modeled with the same rigor.
The 2026 Global IT Benchmark found that employee happiness with laptops and computers turned negative for the first time in five years — falling from +8 in 2024 to -6 in 2025.
Lost time linked to device issues climbed alongside it, from 4 hours 58 minutes to 5 hours 8 minutes per employee, per month.
Device performance is now the second largest driver of that experience score, behind only the device model itself — ahead of reliability, ahead of support quality.
Five extra hours a month, multiplied across a few hundred laptops quietly past their prime, is not a rounding error on a payroll budget. It is the kind of number that never appears on an asset register, because an asset register was never built to measure it.
What stays invisible when a PC isn’t replaced
Boot and load times creep, they don’t crash
A laptop rarely fails outright when it ages past its intended cycle. It just gets slower — a few extra seconds to boot, a beat longer for an app to respond — in increments too small for any one person to complain about.
Battery and thermal behavior degrade quietly
Battery capacity and thermal throttling both worsen with age, and both show up as “it feels slower today” long before they show up as a support ticket.
The workaround nobody reports
An employee who feels their laptop struggling rarely files a ticket. They route around it — a personal phone for anything urgent, a personal laptop for anything heavy — and that workaround quietly becomes a device IT never asked to manage.
A machine employees quietly route around is a machine IT has lost visibility into, for reasons that have nothing to do with security policy. The original device is still on the network, still holding company data, and still invisible to whoever is supposed to be tracking it.
An asset register tells you how old a laptop is. It does not tell you how it feels to use one.
Asset registers don’t measure this
Most IT teams manage hardware lifecycle through two things: age and a manufacturer’s recommended cycle. Neither one measures how a specific machine is actually performing today.
That gap is compounded by how much of endpoint management still runs on manual effort. PDQ’s 2026 State of Sysadmin report found that 36% of sysadmins describe endpoint management as mostly manual today, while 73% want it mostly or fully automated.
Manual tracking scales to a few dozen laptops. It does not scale to a fleet that is aging on purpose, unevenly, for budget reasons that have nothing to do with how each machine is actually holding up.
It’s not a hardware problem, it’s a visibility problem
The financial logic behind stretching a refresh cycle is sound. The mistake is treating every laptop in the fleet as if it ages at the same rate.
Some machines will run three extra years without a complaint. Others were already marginal before the freeze, and are now the ones employees are quietly working around.
Without device-level performance data, IT cannot tell those two groups apart — so replacement decisions default back to age, which is exactly the measure that just got told to wait.
Making an extended lifecycle safe, in order
- Baseline real performance per device, not just age.Boot time, app responsiveness, and battery health say more about a laptop’s remaining useful life than its purchase date does.
- Flag the tail before it reaches the help desk.The slowest 10-15% of a fleet is usually identifiable well before employees start complaining or working around the machine.
- Replace by degradation curve, not by depreciation schedule.A three-year-old laptop still performing well can wait; a two-year-old one already struggling should not.
- Feed the data back into the budget conversation.“Keep the fleet longer” is a defensible call when it comes with evidence about which machines can actually absorb the extra time.
Real-time performance visibility means tracking trend lines per device — boot time, CPU and memory pressure, disk health — not a single snapshot. A laptop that was fine in January and is measurably slower in July tells IT something a static asset tag never will.
How INGITE helps
Cloud EndPoint Performance
See real-time performance per device across the fleet — boot time, resource pressure, battery health — so an extended refresh cycle is a decision made with evidence, not a freeze applied blindly to every machine.
Cloud Asset Management
Pair performance data with a live inventory of every device’s age, warranty, and specs, so the replacement list is built from what a machine actually needs, not just how long it has been in service.
How old is the slowest laptop still issued to someone on your team?
Before the next budget cycle locks in another year of deferred replacements, answer these honestly:
- Can you rank your fleet by actual performance, not just purchase date?
- Do you know which employees have quietly started using a personal device for real work?
- If the refresh budget got cut again next year, could you say which machines can safely wait?
- Is your lifecycle decision based on evidence, or on the manufacturer’s recommended cycle?
If the honest answer to more than one of those is “no,” extending the fleet’s life is not the risk. Doing it blind is.
What is endpoint performance monitoring?
Why are companies extending PC replacement cycles in 2026?
How much productivity is lost to slow computers?
Should IT track hardware age or hardware performance when planning a refresh?
Extend the fleet’s life without extending the risk
Real-time performance data on every device, so “keep it longer” is a decision backed by evidence instead of a guess applied to the whole fleet.