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Real World Stats Show Chromebooks Are Struggling

Posted by timothy on from the show-me-your-pony's-next-trick dept.

recoiledsnake writes "The first real world stats for Chromebooks show that they're struggling to have any traction in the marketplace. In its first week of monitoring worldwide usage of Google's Chrome OS, NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly 2/100 of 1 percent, a figure too small to earn a place on its reports. The first Chromebooks went on sale in June 2011, nearly two years ago, with Acer reportedly selling fewer than 5000 units in the first six months and Samsung selling even fewer. In the past three years, Chromebook sales have been worse than even three months worth of WindowsRT sales. Perhaps users are heeding Stallman's warning on Chromebooks. We previously discussed reports of Chromebook topping Amazon sales, selling to 2000 schools and wondered whether QuickOffice on ChromeOS can topple Microsoft Office." I find ChromeOS good in some contexts (any place that a browser and a thin layer of Linux is all you need), but the limitations are frustrating — especially on hardware that can run a conventional Linux as well as Google's specialized one. We'll watch for developments in the Google hardware world at next week's I/O conference.

5 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Give up by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Make it a linux machine with deep ties to the net, not an internet machine with crappy compromises for offline use. Make it an offline machine FIRST, then worry about adding your online hooks.

    --
    Good-bye
    1. Re:Give up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah but a laptop with no offline capability is like having a thin client that does not work half the time - which is exactly the issue with Chromebooks. It'll make a bit more sense if it was a stationary unit that always had a steady and fast Internet connection.

  2. Re:I quite like mine. by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Informative

    Very easy to run Chrombuntu on and then it makes the best laptop I know of for that price.

  3. Wait... what? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.

    X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Imagine the day you're booted off Google by retrosteve · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.

    Examples on the internet of this are easy to find:
    http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/
    http://classicsynth.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Disabled-Google-Account-Back

    Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.