You wouldn’t keep your smartphone for 10 years, so why would you wait that long to update your payment terminals?
We personally know the value of upgrading technology, but refreshes like these still tend to get pushed. Why? Because the terminals still work, customers are still showing up, and there’s always something more urgent to spend the money on. That’s a reasonable way to run a budget, but it’s worth being honest that putting the decision off has a price, and right now that price is rapidly rising.
Terminals are getting more expensive
The main reason has nothing to do with the typical culprits, like inflation. AI data centers are buying up a huge share of the world’s memory chips, which leaves less supply for everyone else, therefore raising prices on memory chipsets within payment terminals.
Gartner expects DRAM prices to climb 125–130% year over year in 2026, and expects the shortage to last into 2028. Terminal manufacturers have already started to adjust their pricing to reflect the higher memory costs. So a refresh priced today will not cost the same thing in eighteen months. Waiting assumes prices will settle down, but nothing in the current market outlook supports that.
The costs you’re already absorbing
The bigger expense is the one buried in day-to-day operations, and there’s recent data on it. Our 2026 report with Verifone and Retail Dive surveyed 1,018 consumers and 200 retail and hospitality leaders about checkout and payments, and the findings are worth sitting with.
Sixty-eight percent of leaders said their payment hardware is more than four years old. Older terminals can limit which payment types you can accept, make software updates slower to roll out, and bring reliability and security concerns that affect day-to-day operations.
Customers feel this even though they never think about the hardware itself. About 70% of consumers said technical problems at checkout hurt their experience, whether that’s a system freezing, a terminal failing, or a scanner that won’t read. Declined payments left 65% with a negative impression. And 75% said the checkout experience a business offers influences where they shop or stay at all.
Why companies stall anyway
The survey is pretty direct about what holds businesses back. Seventy-eight percent of leaders pointed to high upfront costs and 58% pointed to uncertainty about ROI, well ahead of things like integration difficulty or trouble getting leadership on board. Not one leader in the survey said they felt fully prepared to modernize.
Some of that comes down to how the return on investment gets measured. More than half expect to see results from a POS upgrade within a week to a month. At a more realistic timeframe of 7+ months for results to surface, only 10% are willing to wait that long. The problem: chasing quick wins can leave you locked into a system that doesn’t fit where the business is going.
Where the industry is headed
A hardware refresh for your business is table stakes at this point. The question now becomes: what operating system should your terminals be running on?
Android is now the operating system on roughly half of the terminals shipped globally, and Counterpoint Research expects that to reach close to 70% by the early 2030s. It’s taking over from legacy platforms that were slow to build, expensive to come by, and hard to move on from. Many providers are now building their software on Android operating systems, so that updates and integrations stop being major projects.
There’s another deadline element too. Security certifications are retiring approvals for older devices through 2027, and plenty of large fleets are already past their supported update window. For a lot of businesses, the refresh is going to happen regardless. The only real question is when—and with what operating system.
If you’re running terminals that are four or more years old, the business case for replacement is simple: act now. Delaying only increases the likelihood of higher hardware costs and greater operational risk.
If you’re not already running on Android, the need to modernize is even more pressing. Every month you wait leaves you further behind newer Android-based capabilities while driving up the cost of the upgrade you’ll eventually need to make.