Report: 68% of US adults now own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011, 45% own a tablet, no growth in ownership of other digital devices in recent years
Technology Device Ownership: 2015 — 68% of Americans have smartphones; 45% have tablet computers. Ownership of other digital devices has not grown in recent years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Six months after an [[a:827881|April Pew survey put smartphone ownership at 64% and flagged that 10% of owners had no home broadband]], the fall update shows the curve still climbing steeply: 68% of US adults now own a smartphone, double the 2011 share, with tablets at 45%. The sharper signal is what isn't growing — every other digital device category has flatlined.
The report reads as the midpoint of an arc the corpus completes on both ends: shopping data released a year later shows 51% of consumers already buying via phone, and by late 2018 Pew measured internet, smartphone, and social media usage as fully plateaued since 2016. 2015 is the last leg of rapid adoption before saturation sets in.
First-order effects
- Smartphones cross into clear-majority territory among US adults, making the phone rather than the PC or home broadband line the default American computing and connectivity device — including for households that have no fixed broadband at all.
Second-order effects
- Commerce and media distribution tilt further to the handset: with half of consumers already purchasing on mobile per Pew's follow-up data, retailers and ad buyers must treat small screens as the primary channel rather than a secondary one.
Third-order effects
- The flatlining of all other device categories alongside rising smartphone share points toward consolidation around one general-purpose device, with the 2018 usage plateau confirming that once penetration nears its ceiling, growth shifts from hardware adoption to time and activity within the installed base.
The trend: US consumer technology is consolidating around the smartphone as the single dominant device, with adoption curves for every other hardware category flattening as penetration saturates.