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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.
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.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
No, they wouldn't.
Killing Reader doesn't mean Google is shutting down all of their products. Reader is the only "important" project they've shut down and that's only because we are all nerds and used Reader constantly. Most people on the internet don't use RSS or even know what it is.
Chromebooks are one of the major pieces of Google's ecosystem. There's no way they will be shut down or neglected unless Google completely changes its business model. At that point we will have more to complain about than Google shutting down a few products.
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.
I don't think that anybody is arguing that Chromebooks aren't a self-serving product for Google, just that they are a popular-with-users self-serving product for Google.
As best I can tell, Google has diffused most of the serious-nerd hate by making it pretty trivial(not supported as in 'sure, we'll be happy to do customer support for your custom linux distro'; but supported as in 'there are official directions on how to bypass the Google-Blessed payload and boot your own') to turn them into quite competent(and very cheap) full linux machines if you don't like the 'chromebook' stuff, and the less serious end of the market (A) doesn't actually care all that much and (b) is choosing between multiple self-serving products, not between utopian products and self-serving products.
Microsoft can't kill off its legacy OSes overnight, so scoring a Win7 system isn't rocket science; but 8 and 8.1(doubly so for RT) make it abundantly clear that the Redomond Future is app stores, Microsoft accounts, and Skydrive integration. Over in Cupertino, your iOS device makes the app store and Apple Account Exciting and Mandatory!, while your OSX device starts at $1000(barring only the mini, which isn't portable and doesn't even come with pack-in peripherals, making it a questionable buy for consumers, though attractive for lab/kiosk type work) and makes it increasingly clear that anything outside the app store is a second class citizen. Plus, of course, be it Windows or OSX, probably a good half of the users are going to have Gmail open pretty much all the time anyway, so they aren't exactly shying away from Google even if they choose otherwise.
None of the major vendors give a damn about your desire(if you have one, and a good many people don't) to be free of the mothership, so it's understandable why Google's limited(but stalwartly idiot-proof) and crazy cheap offering would be popular.
Find me one product in any market that is not self serving.
Buy a dozen eggs, the farmer not only uses the money to feed the chickens, but his own children as well as buying new shoes and maybe some beer.
Its all self serving.
And your discussion of nice and nicer without reference to price is totally non-helpful.
The real problem that I see with chromebooks and the whole cloud storage issue is that the law basically says anything left un-accessed for 6months is abandoned, and fair game, and doesn't even require a warrant.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Will you be bombarded with ads? Sure?
nope?
if you never visit a google site, you'll never see a google ad on your chromebook. they don't insert ads at the OS level.
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.
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.