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Limitations and All, Chromebooks Appear To Be Selling
puddingebola writes "A number of different websites are commenting on NPD's consumer research numbers that claim Chromebooks are getting 20-25% of the sub-$300 PC market. From the article: 'The NPD says that Google's Chromebook has now gained 20 to 25 percent of the sub-$300 laptop market in the U.S. That's a huge gain for a computer that's only been on the market for two years. It's even more impressive when you consider that Chromebooks were seen as nothing but a self-serving experiment on the part of Google for the first year of their existence.' Stephen Vaughan-Nichols is also blogging about this over at ZDnet. While the PC market shrank again in the second quarter of 2013, Chromebooks seem to have grown."
Got a Samsung ARM Chromebook. Perfect little netbook. Boots in 5 seconds, all day battery, 1 kg, plenty fast, does everything I need it to do. Can load linux in chroot environment if I want/need more functionality (hardly ever do). Prefer it to a tablet for browsing and media consumption.
Outside of a minority of technically minded folks, most people never wanted local storage in the first place. They don't want to understand it, manage it, back it up, or deal with it in any way. That simple fact is one of the key drivers toward cloud computing, web apps, and away from the local-storage model of computing.
People's data is generally safer in the cloud than locally. Yes, yes, we all know that those service can go away. But the fact is that even so, it's still safer than Joe Schmoe trying to keep his data safe locally.
So the market is pushing heavily in this direction, driven by the demand of the consumer masses. It's a slow transition over time, but eventually, that's going to be where the economies of scale are. Sure, workstation-type computers will still be available for the few people doing CAD, etc, but they will be far more expensive and not generally purchased by most of the general public. This is already starting to happen, and it's only going to accelerate.
I know very few people who really want a PC any more. They virtually all prefer tablets, smartphones, and so on.
OK, only about 100 of them, but a small blip. I'm wondering how many of these were sold to schools or for other mass consumption functions. As a school principal, I see that chromebooks--limitations and all--are still a much improved value over a $1200 windows laptop. (yes $1200 after the kid-proof warranty). I know i could roll my own, but I would rather bring back my librarian, nurse, music teacher, and instructional aides before hiring a sysadmin to make linux laptops go.
Chromebooks have all the "it just works" of a mac at 20% of the cost. They are tamper-proof out of the box and lightning fast for 99% of things that students use the computers for.
The only thing I think is a gaping limitation is the lack of IP printing without a middleman. It's kind of stupid that i need to have an XP machine running somewhere in order to print. Organizations looking to supplement their hardware options with chromebooks shouldn't need to buy special printers to go with them.
Chromebook == Awesome
Bought my mom one when they first came out. A year later she accidentally stepped on it, ruining the power connector. They cheap enough that I just decided to buy her a new one. She logged in and all her stuff was just there. Completely seamless. And of course, I don't have to worry about her getting viruses.
I almost bought the new ARM Chromebook instead of a new Macbook Air, but I had to go with the Air and OS X so I could run examination software. Chromebooks definitely rock, though. I spend most of my day in terminal windows. I still use mutt for e-mail, and tin for reading newsgroups, when I'm not working or browsing the web. The ARM Chromebook is like a dream come true. I'm pi$$ed I was stifled by the man.
Chromebooks most certainly are self-serving products for Google. Just because they aren't selling on the same scale as Android doesn't make them charity devices.
To really use a Chromebook do you need to have a Google account? Yeah?
Will you be bombarded with ads? Sure?
Are the two complaints I just listed above huge bones of contention for Windows 8 & 8.1 (substituting Microsoft's online services for Google's)? YES.
So just because the Google version is "free" does that make it insanely great while a Windows machine is full of spyware? Not necessarily. A Chromebook running real Linux is nice, but a better-specced Windows notebook that also runs real Linux can be quite a bit nicer.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Linux-based Netbooks were killed by MS right when they were fixing to take off. Maybe this means we are finally to a point MS can't just kill off competitors easily any more.
Chrombooks don't make much sense to me...but it seems like a good thing that someone can launch something with a OS with a tiny market share, and it actually sell well enough to keep making them.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I fly a lot for work --two roundtrips per month-- and have been carrying my Chromebook as a second machine, to supplement my corporate laptop. Being a corporate machine, I do not have admin rights to the laptop and my employer tells me they reserve the right to monitor what I'm doing with it, so I assume the laptop has spyware on it.
The Chromebook gets used for my personal stuff in the evenings, when I'm in my hotel room - I figure that my employer doesn't need to know what I'm buying/selling on ebay, nor do they need to know what political sites I read, nor do they need to know what stories I'm submitting to slashdot.... nor do they need to know that I prefer big breasted brunettes.
When flying, I almost always sit in tiny "economy class" seats - the chromebook works well in those seats. I can actually open it up and actually type on it while sitting on a plane, even tiny regional jets. I usually can't open my corporate notebook up on a plane because it is too big to fit between me and the seat in front of me.... and that's before the jerk in front of me reclines back into my space.
The Chromebook also came with a dozen free Gogo passes. Gogo passes were costing $14 each, if I remembered to buy them prior to my flight.... so the dozen free passes were worth $168 to me. All in all, I consider my $250 Samsung Chromebook was money very well spent.
I couple years ago I bought an Acer Aspire One with Win7 loaded on it, but if I walk into a big box store, I only see Samsungs and Acer C7s (which are just rebadged netbooks from a year ago).
He's definitely not a nerd, and just a windows guy.
He likes it, he says its nice and light, cool, and runs quite a long time on the battery. Most of what he does is just internet stuff so that works.
He cant print directly to his printer, but he can go through his windows PC. Mainly he sees it as a great travel laptop as if its taken he can recover via Google and its not a major financial loss. I think for those who have a desktop and need a capable yet inexpensive travel laptop, this will probably hit the mark.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
At $10 per gigabyte to upload and $10 per gigabyte to download over a cellular network in the United States, this safety has a substantial cost associated with it.
1. if you don't have access to broadband, this isn't for you
2. if you need to transfer a substantial portion of your total data each month, this isn't for you
in other words, it's for almost everyone.
I picked up an Acer C7 to keep at a second office for occassional use. For what I do, Chrome OS doesn't cut it, so I installed the Chrubuntu distro in a separate partition. The only real complaint, I guess, is that the keyboard is cheap and doesn't have much "feel" to the keys. Lots of other minor complaints (Unity stinks, Gnome 3 stinks) but managed to work around them all. Wired ethernet and VGA connector for external display were used heavily (sorry Samsung, you don't have either - a big negative.) Biggest surprise was that the Celeron processor actually has decent performance.
Having said that, my intent was actually to see if Chrome OS could be tweaked so as to do all the things I need, and the chroot'ed version of Linux may be the way to go to get new software installed. A project for the future.
Two words.
Unlimited data.
The kind of people who would make their tablet their primary device are those who would pay for unlimited data
1 Samsung Arm CB + x2go + Chrubuntu (13.10 xubuntu) =
full access to running programs on my home Linux PC from anywhere, with HUGE battery life, at less than 2 lbs and $250. With x2go I can run applications remotely, and the chromebook only has to handle the UI, not the actual processing. As a result, I can run Intel apps and it feels pretty fast, even from 2000 miles away. If the computer gets stolen, it's only a loss of $250 as opposed to the thousands a lightweight laptop would cost, and the data is on my home computer, not the cb...
x2go btw is amazing, tunneling linux application's interfaces through ssh, so they feel like they're running on the chromebook, but aren't. If you can set up ssh, you can set up x2go.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Never in my life would I have expected Slashdotter of all people to be promoting living in the Cloud and giving away all control over your data to a corporation. Sure, the needs of regular folk are likely less than what we'd require, but it's still a fundamental issue of control that we shouldn't' be promoting.
Responsibility requires effort, but empowers the user. To basically give away that control simply because it's "too hard" to know how your files are saved and where on local storage, smacks of going backwards.
never in my life would i have expected a slashdotter to promote keeping *your money in mutual funds* and giving away all control over *your money* to a corporation. To basically give away that control simply because it's "too hard" to *store all your money under your matress* and keep track of *where it is buried in the yard*, smacks of going backwards.
sounds pretty stupid now doesn't it?
i'm not going backwards, i'm just in touch with reality. people like you have drawn an arbitrary line in the sand with cloud storage. everything about you is already stored online. your medical records, your credit card history, your tax history, your financials, and so on. all under the control of corporations. but you think if you keep those pictures of your son's 5th birthday party, that no one gives a flying poop about, on a local disk instead of the cloud, you are somehow "under control"?