SquareTrade Study Finds Holidays Can Be Tough on Devices

For many, the holiday season brings with it a time of fun, family togetherness, ridiculous amounts of food and at least a little stress. But a new report from SquareTrade proves that it's not just stressful on people, but also on devices, as fully one in eight households surveyed reported that, during the holidays, one of the precious devices in the house was damaged somehow.

The SquareTrade report goes on to describe more than just the 15 million American households who have somehow broken something during the holiday season. It goes on to detail how 35 percent of devices damaged were actually mobile phones, showing that this segment of the device ecosystem takes quite a beating around holiday time. A majority—51 percent—of the damage is done in the pursuit of various holiday activities, with seven percent of devices damaged while decorating. Ten percent of devices took damage while the users were cooking—reasonable enough, really; leave something too close to the oven while checking recipe directions and boom, dead—and 12 percent of devices took damage in the shopping frenzies. The biggest source of damage for portable devices came from traveling at fully 22 percent.

Interestingly, proportions of damage were unusually skewed here as well. When it comes to damaged devices during the holidays, iPhones are reported damaged at fully twice the rate of Samsung smartphones. Though that likely has something to do with total sales made—if twice as many devices are sold, then proportionally, twice as many are using said devices and twice as many will in turn get damaged—it's still interesting that such a marked difference would occur.

CMO of SquareTrade, Ty Shay, offered a bit of commentary on this issue, saying, “Retailers are expecting sales of over $640 billion during this year's holiday shopping season, and no doubt much of that will go towards gifting high-tech devices like smartphones, tablets and game consoles – fragile and high priced items that apparently need extra safeguarding during the holidays.” Given that SquareTrade offers policies that accomplish such protections, meanwhile, it's quite reasonable to see SquareTrade getting behind such a survey.

The survey itself, meanwhile, provides a very reasonable perspective itself. Exposing a device to the outside increases the likelihood of something going wrong; all those bumps and jostles and the like are seldom good for devices. Traveling is especially so, with devices being basically out of the house for the entire time. Throw in cooking and decorating, things that involve a lot of movement, sharp things and occasionally hot things and the devices involved are being exposed to a lot of things to which said devices aren't normally exposed. As for shopping, hit most any Black Friday video on YouTube and see what that could do to a smartphone. Throw in the fact that kids are home more thanks to school vacations and the whole thing adds up.

So it's not particularly surprising that more devices are damaged during the holidays. People are doing more things in general, and certainly more things that are out of the ordinary, during the holiday season, and these deviations from the norm increase the likelihood that something adverse will happen. But with a little extra care, this time of year that proves the happiest for so many will likely continue to prove happy, and safe for devices as well.