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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.
I have one, and it is pretty good for what it is. I think I am going to pass it down to my mother.
Just about no effort to admin the machine, fast enough, and simple.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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.
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I've seen these percentages reported a lot of places, but I have yet to be able to find anything that lists actual sales numbers. Without knowing how big the market for sub-$300 PC market is, it's a meaningless measurement. For example, if 50 million sub-$300 PCs were sold, 25% is a really respectable number. If two million sub-$300 PCs were sold then the 500,000 total sales are quite disappointing.
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.
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They wouldn't do that, though. Would they?
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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
People's data is generally safer in the cloud than locally.
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.
It is basically a iPad minus all the sexy touch screen things. Built on solid reliable technology using well understood tested input devices and formats. And more open too. No wonder it is growing. I am actually thinking of getting a second and a bluetooth keyboard+thumbwheel to serve as the streaming device for the home theater. It has HDMI out and works with Amazon videos, Netflix.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Much like MS can afford to introduce something that is a loss at first, Google can too.
They see a long term plan for these as more and more people move into the 'media consumption' arena, but still want an attached keyboard.
Personally i'm glad we have more ARM options.. i'm tired of x86.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
She's got a windows box which is in bad shape. I've got two ChromeBoxs running Ubuntu.
The safe, quick-boot, always updated, easy to manage seems like it's perfect for the "only need the web and email" crowd.
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Tinker with an older EEEpc and it is obvious that WindowZ abuses the hardware budget. A tight linux distro and a darn quick browswe and Bob's your uncle.
Nothing magic about Chrome given the recent Firefox improvements.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
So you got a dozen free Gogo passes and turned in the cost on your expense account anyway. Well played Sir, well played.
Seriously, the Gogo passes would really help. Thanks for sharing that one.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
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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I was one of the lucky many who got a free Cr-48. I've used it pretty much every day since December 2010; as others have noted, it makes a wonderful second computer, or a "don't care" travel laptop, or something that your relative with a porn/click ALL THE LINKS habit can't break.
The '48 is crap for playing movies, though; anything more than 360p resolution is annoyingly choppy. Probably a non-Atom Chromebook would do just fine.
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E pluribus sanguinem
I bought a Samsung ARM Chromebook a few months back. While it's absolutely perfect for web browsing on its own and its battery performance is exemplary, I find myself using it less and less. It's not because I mislike the machine, nor is it that I cannot do the majority of my work in a browser, it's simply that I prefer to have separate applications for separate tasks. I now just use a netbook with Arch Linux instead. I still recommend the Chromebook openly, though. It's a fantastic device with excellent build quality for the price and, as a web browser, it's not to be beaten any time soon.
SD cards are expensive relative to their capacity. Thumb drives are annoying because they stick out, so they're inconvenient if you're moving a lot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've found that SD cards are available as cheaply as thumb drives, or even cheaper... but only slow ones
And yes, I am counting devices with lifetime or at minimum five year warranties only. I don't screw around. I've had too much flash go bad on me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The growth doesn't mean anything. You can grow in a shrinking market if you're new. The idea of having to be on all the time and having google try to lock my data into their services which may or may not disappear or be the same any time in the future is not appealing to me. It's even less appealing to hand my data over to a company in bed with the NSA which it would appear Google are.
If one messes around with a Chromebook, and then some Windows 8 type device, the difference is startling (in favor of the Chromebook). Chromebooks out-Apple Apple by just making it easy to do the things most people want to do. The voice recognition is really, really good. Windows makes it surprisingly difficult to do *anything*.
2011 - netbooks sell like crazy
2012 - people realize netbooks are unusably slow, have too small of a screen, and have double the failure rate of laptops plus no shops will fix them
2013 - people buy Chromebooks and tablets
2014 - people realize they can't run any useful software on a Chromebook and it's a single-use style device that lives in its own little fairy magic land and stop using it. They also realize that you can't type on tablets so they're useless for almost everything.
2015 - Microsoft realizes they fucked up and releases an actually good Windows 9 and everyone buys PCs
You missed the point. I wasn't comparing the two options you suggested to each other, rather I was pointing out the shortfalls of both solutions compared to what dronebooks lack, i.e. a proper HD with heads and magnets and stuff.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and frankly, for the average non-technical user, that's enough.
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