Smartphones To Smartwatches: What Americans Actually Own

Illustration: GADGETAmerican Quartz The tech gadgets most Americans own, according to Pew Research Center, say as much about daily routines as they do about the technology industry. The smartphone has moved from a luxury purchase to something close to universal. The desktop computer, written off repeatedly, still sits in millions of homes. Smart speakers arrived fast, then settled. What people report owning gives a clearer picture of American life than any product launch does.

What makes Pew's work useful is repetition. The organization asks U.S. adults similar questions year after year, which turns isolated figures into trend lines. A device that shows up in most households one year and holds there the next has become ordinary household equipment. A category that climbs quickly and then flattens tells a different story — about novelty fading, price resistance, or a market reaching everyone it was ever going to reach. This list covers the seven device categories Pew has tracked most consistently: smartphones, desktop and laptop computers, tablets, smart speakers, smart TVs and streaming devices, gaming consoles, and wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Each has a different adoption curve and a different job inside the house. For some, non-ownership is now the more unusual finding. Others split roughly down the middle, along the lines of age, GADGETAmerican household income, and education that Pew's surveys flag again and again. Those gaps matter beyond the hardware itself. Pew's research on home broadband and on smartphone-dependent internet users shows that device ownership is unevenly distributed.

The consequences fall hardest on lower-income households and older adults. A phone used as a substitute for a computer handles some tasks poorly, including job applications, school assignments, and certain government forms. None of this predicts what comes next. It describes where U.S. households stand now, based on what people report in surveys rather than on shipment estimates or marketing claims. Taken together, the seven categories below map how most American homes actually use technology day to day.

Smartphones remain the most widely owned device Illustration: Quartz The smartphone is the most commonly owned device Pew Research Center tracks, held by the large majority of U.S. adults across nearly every demographic group. No other category in Pew's technology surveys comes close to that level of saturation. Ownership climbed steadily after the first iPhone and early Android handsets reached the market in the late 2000s.

What began as a product for early adopters and younger, higher-income buyers spread outward through Pew's survey years to older adults, lower-income households, and people without college degrees. The curve was steep for roughly a decade, then flattened near the top — the shape of a market that has already reached most of the people it can reach. Gaps persist, though they are narrower than they once were. Pew's surveys consistently show lower smartphone ownership among adults 65 and older, and among those in lower-income households.

Rural Americans report somewhat lower ownership than urban and suburban residents, a pattern tied to differences in cellular coverage and broadband availability rather than to interest in the devices themselves. Pew also measures what the phone replaces. For years it has tracked smartphone-dependent internet users — people who own a smartphone but have no home broadband subscription.