Technology analyst firm Gartner Inc. said today it’s expecting a sharp fall in sales of personal devices such as personal computers, tablets and mobile phones this year.

Although hardware sales have benefited to some extent from businesses and individuals buying more laptops to cope with working from home, Gartner said it still sees total worldwide personal device shipments falling by 14% this year, to just 1.9 billion units.

Gartner’s pre-coronavirus pandemic forecast had put shipments at 2.16 billion units, just up from 2.15 billion in 2019.

But the analyst firm expects PC shipments to fall by about 10% in 2020, while Chromebook, notebook and tablet sales will also decline sharply this year.

“The forecasted decline in the PC market in particular could have been much worse,” said Ranjit Atwal, senior research director at Gartner. “However, government lockdowns due to COVID-19 forced businesses and schools to enable millions of people to work from home and increase spending on new notebooks, Chromebooks and tablets for those workers. Education and government establishments also increased spending on those devices to facilitate e-learning.”

On the plus side, Gartner said there’s likely to be more diversity in laptop design going forward as many companies choose to make the work-from-home trend more permanent. It said around 48% of employees will choose to continue working from home at least some of the time once the pandemic ends, compared with just 30% of workers who did so before.

That will cause IT departments to shift more toward notebooks, tablets and Chromebooks for their workers, Gartner said. “This trend combined with businesses required to create flexible business continuity plans will make business notebooks displace desk-based PCs through 2021 and 2022,” Atwal added.

There’s even less reason to be optimistic about mobile phone shipments, Gartner said. The expected boost from this year’s 5G rollout has all but evaporated, and the analyst firm said it expects shipments to fall 14.6% this year, to just 1.5 billion units. Just 11% of those phones will be 5G-ready, Gartner said.

“The delayed delivery of some 5G flagship phones is an ongoing issue,” said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner. “Moreover, the lack of 5G geographical coverage along with the increasing cost of the 5G phone contract will impact the choice of a 5G phone.”

The mobile phone industry is also suffering as consumers increasingly hang on to their devices for longer, with many using the same handset for up to three years, Gartner said. The average pocket life on a mobile phone will rise from 2.5 years to 2.7 years in 2020, as consumers see fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade to newer models because of a lack of innovation.

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