Okay player, this is your time to shine. The 2020 holidays may be your only chance to disappear behind a gaming screen in the middle of family festivities. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ll have some familiar company.

It’s been a long year of masks, distancing and working and learning from home. But there’s still hope for having happy holidays. Even if you can’t get the family together this year for gifts and caroling, you can still toast Christmas—and, ahem, ​THE END OF 2020—with your closest fam and friends.

Ah, the holidays. A time to slow down and reflect. To catch up with family over a table loaded with roast beast and who-hash. To relish bankrupting your uncle in Monopoly because one Christmas he gave your sisters 20 bucks each and nothing to you. (But let’s not get petty.)

Well, the 2020 edition is even better. Now we get to experience it all on the soft glow of a video screen instead of face to face. Yes, folks, the socially distanced holidays are here.

Watching all the new tech gadgets roll into the news feed on a near-daily basis can be dizzying. How can there possibly be 8k video when we’re just getting used to 4k TV resolution? Like the pop philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast.” Hopefully your internet does, too.

A little more than a decade into the smartphone revolution, most device technology as we know it today has matured. Device makers appear to have agreed on a standard form factor, and consumers can find reliable hardware and stable operating systems on every platform.

As a result, people are hanging onto their devices longer. The lifespan of smart devices is steadily increasing in the U.S., evident in a drop in smartphone shipments. In the first quarter of 2019, device makers shipped 6.6 percent fewer phones year-over-year, on top of a 4.9 percent YOY decline in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The smart-phone thinkers and tinkerers in Silicon Valley keep coming up with cool camera gadgets and other mobile device features that make our lives easier in ways we never imagined. (DYK you can delete a texting typo by shaking an iPhone? True story.)

But the mobile device game isn’t just about camera pixels and design tweaks. Smart phones have a pre-determined shelf life that affects when new gizmos reach your fingertips. As that time of year rolls around again, we’re pulling back the shades on what goes into the process of dropping phone prices.