When hardware prices remain high, the smartest move isn’t to hunt for cheaper devices. It’s wise to replace only the devices that are truly failing and get the full useful life out of everything else. To do so requires data about how each and every device performs (not a fixed refresh date on a calendar).
The situation we’re in, sadly, isn’t a short-term blip. Gartner® research, Top Projects for 2027 to Manage the IT Hardware Pricing Crisis, states: “Through 2030, prices for PCs will stabilize at a rate 50% higher than their 2025 levels due to increased hardware specifications to meet AI workload demands.”¹
For IT leaders, that changes the question from where can we cut? to is every device we own reaching its full lifespan?
Why the Calendar-Based Refresh Is Breaking Down
For years, PC refresh ran on a schedule. Every device reaches a certain age and gets swapped out, usually in big batches.
Think of replacing every tire on a fleet of delivery vans at the same exact mileage, regardless of wear. You’d retire plenty of tires with thousands of miles left, while a few worn-out ones might have failed before the date arrived. A fixed cycle does the same thing to your endpoints: it retires healthy machines early and keeps struggling ones in service for too long.
That tradeoff was tolerable, and nobody really thought hard about it, when hardware was both cheap and predictable. With prices sky-high right now, every unnecessary replacement is a significant waste of money, and big-bang refreshes are much harder to defend in an IT budget meeting.
What a Data-Driven Device Refresh Looks Like
A data-driven refresh means IT decides to replace a device based on how it’s actually performing day in and day out, not on how old it is. The signals come from Digital Employee Experience (DEX) data, which shows how each endpoint behaves in the hands of the employee using it.
The useful signals include:
- Device health: logon times, application launch delays, crashes, memory pressure, and battery degradation
- Employee sentiment: how people say their devices are working, which often catches problems the metrics miss
- Usage patterns: what each person or team actually does all day, and what hardware that work requires
With that picture, IT can target replacements to the individual devices causing pain and sluggish workdays, rather than to whole cohorts. The refresh list stops being a spreadsheet of purchase dates and becomes a ranked case: these devices need attention first, these can wait, and these are fine.
The payoff is simple too. Every device used to the end of its useful life is a purchase deferred. Spending spreads out over time instead of landing in one quarter (ouch), and employees don’t lose productivity along the way.
→ If you want to see how this plays out across the rest of the budget, our IT Asset & Spend Management page goes deeper on right-sizing and reclaiming spend with usage data.
Four Ways to Maximize the Hardware You Already Own
Extending lifespan isn’t only about laptops. These are the places IT teams typically find capacity they’re already paying for.
1. Reclaim Dormant Devices
Laptops in drawers, devices from departed employees, and spares nobody tracks all represent hardware you’ve paid for and aren’t using. A reliable inventory of what’s active and what’s idle is the starting point.
2. Decommission Idle Servers and VMs
Infrastructure tends to accumulate. Machines provisioned for a project that ended long ago still consume capacity, licenses, and attention. Retiring them frees resources without buying anything new.
3. Right-Size PC Configurations
One-size-fits-all purchasing tends to over-spec some devices and under-spec others, and an under-spec’d machine often gets replaced early. Matching hardware to how each group works can lower costs or extend life. On memory, Gartner® is direct: “Gartner does not recommend dropping below 32GB of RAM for standard users and 64GB of RAM for premium users, despite the temptation to see short-term cost savings.”¹
4. Audit Contracts and Warranties
Coverage you never use is money you don’t need to spend. Review hardware contracts and warranties as they come up for renewal, and check whether the tiers you’re paying for match how often your team actually relies on them. Trimming premium tiers and extras is one of the lower-risk ways to really bring hardware costs down.
How to Get Started
You don’t need to overhaul your whole process at once. We suggest taking a practical first pass at it.
Get Visibility
You can’t extend what you can’t see. Start by collecting health and usage data across your physical endpoints. Ensure you have the necessary platform and tools that give IT a real-time view of every device.
Set Replacement Criteria Based on Health
Stop looking purely at age. Define what “needs replacing” means for your environment, such as repeated crashes, sustained performance degradation, or battery failure, and apply it consistently.
Start With One Cohort & Measure
Pick a group that’s due for refresh, replace only the devices that meet your criteria, and track what you saved and how employees responded. Use that result to make the case for expanding.
FAQsHow do you know when to replace a PC?Replace it when its health data shows it’s holding the employee back, such as frequent crashes, slow logons, or degraded battery, rather than simply because it reached a certain age. Treat device age as a useful flag for review and not a verdict. How long should a business laptop last?Many organizations replace business laptops within 3 to 5 years, but there’s no single right answer. It depends on the hardware, the workload, and how the device is managed. A fixed number leaves useful life on the table, and condition tells you more than age, so replace based on device health and employee sentiment. Can you extend device lifespan without hurting employee experience?Yes, as long as you’re watching the experience data. Continuous monitoring lets IT see the effect of keeping a device in service and replace it quickly if it starts costing employees more than it saves. What is a data-driven device refresh?It’s a replacement approach that uses real device health and employee sentiment data to decide which individual devices to replace and when, instead of refreshing entire groups on a fixed schedule. |
The Takeaway
Hardware prices are a budget constraint IT can’t control. How long each device stays useful is something IT can influence. With the right data, you can make every device count, defer the purchases you don’t need, and protect the people who depend on the technology.
Read Top Projects for 2027 to Manage the IT Hardware Pricing Crisis to see the strategic projects Gartner® recommends for optimizing infrastructure costs.
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¹ Gartner, Top Projects for 2027 to Manage the IT Hardware Pricing Crisis, Erin Pierre, Daniel Bowers, Tracy Tsai, 28 September 2026.
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