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Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google's low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple's range of Macs for the first time in the U.S. recently. IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed the milestone to The Verge. "Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16," says Huang. "Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story." IDC estimates Apple's U.S. Mac shipments to be around 1.76 million in the latest quarter, meaning Dell, HP, and Lenovo sold nearly 2 million Chromebooks in Q1 combined. Chromebooks have been extremely popular in US schools, and it's clear from IDC's comments the demand is driving US shipments. Outside of the US, it's still unclear exactly how well Google's low-cost laptops are doing. Most data from market research firms like IDC and Gartner focuses solely on Google's wins in the US.
The low cost with touch screen tells me all the other laptops are extremely marked up. My only disappointment is the lack of apps for it. But for simple Google Docs work, it can't be beat for the dollar.
If all one needs to do is surf the Web, handle minor photo and video editing, then a Chromebook is ideal. A full-blown Mac is a complete waste of money. I'm in IT and manage everything from email servers to Wi-Fi, and now, thanks to modern computing and VPNs, can do everything from a Chromebook or actually, just any browser.
I like Chromebook because they are simple, inexpensive, and are harbingers of what's to come--namely, all of our comings and goings will be on the Web.
This is going to be bad for Apples stock price. This is a continuing indicator of their "meteoric" fall from when Steve was around.
Chomebooks compete with iPads, not Macs. Are they outselling iPads? I doubt it.
So.... Chromebooks are selling like gangbusters to a demographic that is very likely to smash their devices, and it's easier to replace a $200 computer than a $2000 one? Holy crap, stop the presses!
Is it really so hard for Verge to maintain readership, that they need to do ridiculous name drops just to get attention?
Want to know what I *really* want to see? School boards finally realizing that blindly throwing technology at a problem isn't going to result in better outcomes. First iPads, now Chromebooks. They continue to increase the burden of already razor thin IT staff, and I have yet to see one single study indicating that education quality and grades have improved.
They are cheap as hell, last forever on their batteries, and for end-users are effectively immune to malware, adware, and all the other horrible shit that makes your grandmother unable that piece of shit windows laptop. (And it's always a piece of shit windows laptop. What is it about grandmothers and their abilty to buy the very worst laptop ever made?)
And when you have physical access it's easy to put them in developer mode (Which will securely wipe any existing userdata, by design). Then you can get a root shell and install whatever OSS toys you want.
Yeah.
that common users do not want to be administrators. They dont want to think about patches or updates, or antivirus. They just want to open the product, and consume their services.
its great for sysadmins...we'll always have a job. However its a killing stroke for corporations and plutocrats hoping the "learn to code" effort is going to help drive the cost of developers or sysops down. You've spent 50 years getting Americans to consider technology a product. things like DMCA and closed-door trade agreements have all but cemented the notion that the consumer is a mindless cash cow, not to be permitted to touch the technology unless theyre to part with their identity or money. this mindset isnt about to change.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And still I have ZERO interest in having one and I don't have any gadget envy of those who do. Chrome books are more similar to kindles and ipads anyway. So the Hype engine is a fail on the claims which feels a little dishonest.
Yes macs4all, the fact that chromeos devices, that are basically thin clients are outselling overpriced osx hardware is non-news.
I am sorry dude but I think apple is going to be on a decline for some time;
1) Killed 17'
2) Killed FCP
3) Overpriced Trash Can
4) Soldered Memory to Motherboard
How is apple not just building overly priced chromebooks at this point. The only reason for most of their new marketshare is teenage girls wanting to check their facebooks and yewtubes. All things a chromebook can do.... 90% of users on a mac dont need a full fledged desktop OS.
Oh, I know; because it has a reference to Apple/Macs in the Headline.
No. It's because anytime you can say that anything that ever touched on Linux/OSS outsells anything that isn't Linux/OSS the neckbeards start beating their chests again even if it makes no sense by just about any metric.
RC airplanes outsell Boeing in number of units sold! Woohoo!!
... says the guy named "macs4all". lol. talk about a knee-jerk defensive post *sweating on his macbook with apple-phone/apple-pad/itv/iwatch next to him* "uh uh... [obligatory ad-hominem attack that doesn't address the facts presented]"
I discount that Google is subsidizing Chromebooks to enhance sales - there's no dollar discount per device; if anything, what you're really paying on other hardware is the Windows tax.
In fact, for schools, Chromebooks actually cost more thanks to the $30 management license cost to be able to enroll and administer Chromebooks within their Google domain's admin console. This is a per device fee, and if anything this is where the subsidy lies, with larger customers subsidizing the development of the Google admin console for the benefit of all. As a case in point, a small rural school with a dozen Chromebooks pays the same fee per device, net cost $360, as a large urban school district which has tens of thousands of Chromebooks - net cost > $1,000,000, but derives all the same benefits despite having considerably less skin in the game.
However, the Chromebook is a perfectly serviceable web appliance without the management console, just harder to manage or use in groups.
As a standalone device, a user with know how can put it into developer mode, install crouton, and leverage chroots to run one or more linux environments simultaneously with ChromeOS - which in turn can also be used in conjunction with Google Remote Desktop (or the Chrome VNC app...) to access a fuller-fledged desktop OS if you need that functionality but want the portability/convenience/low cost of the Chromebook hardware.
The Mac is not simply a PC. It's a PC with a soldered CPU and soldered RAM, sold at twice the price of an equivalent PC.
Sent from my 2010 Mac mini.
Kids wanted "iPads". I bought 'em $70-ish Android tablets instead. When they break? So what - buy another. Plus any app you'd want to use is probably free, and you don't even have to hook a credit card up to your account to access the Android app store, which is especially nice because it prevents people from making "in-app purchases". (The family uses probably eight Android devices at the moment, and I think the only app anyone's ever bought was the one time my son wanted a full copy of Minecraft on his tablet.)
People actually buy those things?
I always assumed they were like Zunes, or Microsoft Bob; too ridiculous to even consider.
And now they are outselling Macs? I mean, that still makes it a marginal product, but at least it's more than the two or three total items sold one would have expected.
Why is this even a story?
Why is this even a post?
Currently, my mom doesn't have a computer. She's happy to have me do any online stuff that she wants done. But if she ever decides she wants her own computer, I would NOT recommend a Windows box, or even a Mac. I suspect she'd be more comfortable with a keyboard than a touchscreen, so that means a Chromebook. Easier for her than a Windows machine, and MUCH easier for me to support.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
pardon the pun. But a Chromebook is nothing near a Macbook. Chromebooks have very little in the way of memory and storage. The $200 versions have terrible screens. The utility, when not connected to the internet, is quite limited. The Macbook is a full fledged workstation.
I'm not saying that it's a bad choice for schools who are putting them in the hands of teenagers that have yet to develop, shall we say, a sense of responsibility.
Probably a fairer comparison would be to the Surface but even then the Surface has a lot more going for it than a Chromebook. The Chromebook is a low end internet appliance. For very basic tasks its great. Which is to say, for most students it is just fine. But to compare a Chromebook to a Macbook is like comparing a Chevy to a Ferrari.
I'm pretty sure the original rainbow Apple Computer Logo was intentionally a reference to the Bible, where taking a bite out of the magic mushroom of enlightenment made you gay. But then again, that might be wrong, seeing as I just made that up.
This is unadulterated Click-bait...
...that worked on you.
Is this another one of those cases where they're trying to convince people that "shipments" == "sales"? I remember game companies were doing this for a while, before people started to wise up to the fact that they were just talking about games on shelves in stores, not actual sales.
... sold at twice the price of an equivalent PC.
Sorry, not true. I defy you to find a similarly built PC for any more than 5~10 percent less than a comparable Mac. I find that comparable computers run pretty much the same price.
It's okay. It's all balanced because elsewhere for the first time, apples are outselling oranges.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Yes macs4all, the fact that chromeos devices, that are basically thin clients are outselling overpriced osx hardware is non-news.
I am sorry dude but I think apple is going to be on a decline for some time;
1) Killed 17' 2) Killed FCP 3) Overpriced Trash Can 4) Soldered Memory to Motherboard
How is apple not just building overly priced chromebooks at this point. The only reason for most of their new marketshare is teenage girls wanting to check their facebooks and yewtubes. All things a chromebook can do.... 90% of users on a mac dont need a full fledged desktop OS.
They killed the 17 MacBook Pro because no one was buying it, and because doing a 17 inch Retina display would have made the laptop price-prohibitive.
They resurrected FCP, and then added-back nearly all the features they removed back into FCPX.
Overpriced Trash Can? Depends on your use-case. I must admit, they should have left the tower, too. So I'll kind of give you that one.
Soldered memory: Required for Windows Certification since WIndows 8 (or 8.1?). Something about "Secure Boot", IIRC. Actually, I didn't realize that; another Slashdotter (a non-Mac-fan, actually) clued me into that.
And if you peek under the hood at OS X, it is VASTLY more robust than ChromeOS, being a Certified UNIX and all. And I dare say that any Mac you purchase will still be looking and running just fine, long after that Chromebook is in the Landfill, or Tech-Recycler's.
This is unadulterated Click-bait...
...that worked on you.
And apparently you, too.
Your point being???
It's not the first time. We had this discussion years ago...
In 2013...
http://www.ibtimes.com/googles...
A year later they outsell the iPad in schools...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Chromebook sales may exceed those of the Mac but did they factor in returns? Take a look in any BestBuy B&M store and you'll see about a dozen or so for sale marked as returned. It seems that people buy them thinking they are cheap laptops but are really just glorified NetBooks.
Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of the Chromebook, but for what you get I'd rather spend the extra money and get a non-Mac laptop and replace Windows with Debian or CentOS.
Challenge accepted and please not that in pretty much every measure the PC is curbstomping the Mac on performance.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's quite easy to build a PC for half the price as the low-entry Mac mini, which still has components which were already a bit out of date in 2014.
... says the guy named "macs4all". lol. talk about a knee-jerk defensive post *sweating on his macbook with apple-phone/apple-pad/itv/iwatch next to him* "uh uh... [obligatory ad-hominem attack that doesn't address the facts presented]"
Um, I was typing that at Work on my work Win 7 laptop.
And, BTW, ad hominem attacks are the last-defense of the defense-less.
So, what about those facts? Got any FACTUAL rebuttal?
Oh, wait, you're an AC. Nevermind.
release OS X on the PC and just scrap the Mac altogether or spin the hardware business off as a separate company/subsidiary and also release OS X to the PC.. (Because there is nothing unique about a Mac anymore, it's just a PC with a DRM lock)
Michael Dell, is that you?
Why don't you just sign on and fight like a man...
BTW, the ONLY "DRM Lock" in OS X is a file that says "Please Don't Copy OS X". I believe the Installer looks for that; but other than that, Apple has NEVER used TPM or anything else to "lock" OS X to Apple Hardware. They had a TPM chip on the first Intel Mac mobos; but they never implemented a driver for it, and soon removed it altogether.
Truth be told, as long as it doesn't get ridiculous, Apple is actually more-than-happy that the Hackintosh Community exists; because it increases the "mindshare" for OS X.
UNIX certification assures compliance with a particular standard API. That API is obsolete, and it never guaranteed robustness anyway.
I'm not sure there are comparable Windows computers to Macs. Recent OS X laptops have only one port for charging and external connections requiring some kind of hardware for standard USB, ethernet, video, etc. connections and perhaps special kinds of cables from Apple for these connections all at extra cost. And what about that thing called the Mac Pro? Very expensive low powered device compared to various high end desktop systems from the usual cast of manufacturers. We can also bring up the option of touch screens on Windows laptops and net books which is not an option on Mac laptops. Macs are different from Windows PCs making comparisons difficult. I'm not making any statement about which is better or more useful, just that they are different.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Yeah.... makes perfect sense. One thing even my own daughter noticed in middle school though is, all Chromebooks are far from equal. One district she attended school in for a while had really flimsy, cheap Chromebooks that were often breaking down. Another had very nice, solid feeling variants. The main difference between those districts was the tax base in each. The wealthier district had the higher-end Chromebooks in use.
With a Macbook Air, at least you know pretty much what you're getting. Very arguably more than what's needed in a school setting these days -- but it "is what it is". (For our medium sized business, it's a pretty solid all around notebook option for our staff. But we're using Office/Outlook all day long, among other things. Not just web based apps.)
Bing Is Not Google = BING
Web printing sucks. When Google finally puts out a Chrome OS with local USB printing, without having to go through the web and back again, the product will find a larger audience. Windows 10 has pissed off enough people to open up their minds to using Chromebooks as long as they don't need to also buy another printer. People are weird that way.
As a former IT Tech, buying a Chromebook for my wife was one of the most liberating experiences ever. Not to mention she loves it for the simplicity too.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
...doesn't mean Mercedes is in danger.
Dog is my co-pilot.
UNIX certification assures compliance with a particular standard API. That API is obsolete, and it never guaranteed robustness anyway.
LOL!
Better not tell Linux, BSD, etc. that the POSIX API is Obsolete.
You're not in much position to demand substantiation when you fling "CLICKBAIT." and walk off.
In fact, it seems like the appropriate reaction IS to verbally doubt that's a neutral, objective claim, when it comes from a "macs4all".
We really don't need to* do a federal fucking study to verbalize some doubt. Granted, GP wrote with the grace of a squid rolling downhill.
*CITATION NEEDED
You're not in much position to demand substantiation when you fling "CLICKBAIT." and walk off. In fact, it seems like the appropriate reaction IS to verbally doubt that's a neutral, objective claim, when it comes from a "macs4all". We really don't need to* do a federal fucking study to verbalize some doubt. Granted, GP wrote with the grace of a squid rolling downhill. *CITATION NEEDED
And you're STILL an ANONYMOUS COWARD, so STFU.
Sent from my Mac that has user-replaceable RAM that isn't soldered in.
Your Mac doesn't have soldered RAM. Though it's only officially upgradeable to 8GB, It's actually upgradeable to 16GB. I would know. I upgraded the RAM in both a 2009 Mac mini and a 2011 Mac mini. I also installed an SSD alongside the HDD in the 2011 one and was able to configure the two drives to act as a Fusion Drive. Between those upgrades and the discrete GPU (which is a feature that unfortunately hasn't shown up in any of subsequent models), it's kept chugging along like a champ.
Moreover, while it's trivial to put together a parts list for a PC build that beats a Mac, you'd be hard-pressed to find manufacturers with comparable parts at comparable or better prices at the time that a Mac is released. Part of that is because Macs generally have a good bang for the buck at the time that they're released (albeit, with some notable exceptions), but the caveat is that that's only true if you actually intend to use all of the features built into the device. For most people, they'd be perfectly content to cut features they have no intention of using, but they have no way to do so with Apple's take-it-or-leave-it products. Apple will have just a handful of SKUs that assume you want everything included, and you'll like it, damn it, whereas their competition will have 100s of SKUs with every combination under the sun, that way the customers can pick and choose exactly which features matter to them.
Eventually the competition catches up, and because Apple is slow to release new products their price advantage evaporates, but, once again, it was only there to begin with if you're one of the customers who actually wants to use everything that's included, which isn't true of most people. Of course, there are also the intangibles that work in Apple's favor (e.g. OS X, app/device ecosystem, perceived build quality, social status, "saving the environment", etc.), but I'm not taking any of those into account here, because the people who care about those things generally don't care about whether there's a price advantage or not.
For laptops, they are priced the same. The Dell XPS 13 with specs as close as possible to a MBP 13 is about price. The biggest difference is you get onsite support. I did a comparison last week with my MBP 13 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.
Apple doesn't sell the equivalent boxes anymore and it is disingenuous to compare a Mini. For practical purposes, the Mini is really a laptop minus the screen, battery, and input devices. It fits a different use case.
Long time Mac user here. Even made a career out of supporting them. I still have Macs at home, but I'm switching:
1) Apple's closed ecosystem for content sharing has turned me off. No, DLNA isn't as simple, but devices are increasingly ubiquitous.
2) The monstrosity that is the regular updates to iTunes, iPhoto/Photos that have lost content on me in the past and I expect to lose more content in the future...
3) The increasingly limited upgradeability of the hardware.
4) The cost of the hardware for the performance it provides esp for the common tasks
5) Loss of the magic of "It just works" - if you don't keep everything updated in lockstep, and jump through the hoops to maintain your content libraries in the process, you're stuck with unsupported configurations that don't work at all.
My primary machine at home has become a Chromebook. My media server has become a Windows box since Media Player just does seamless DLNA that's supported by other equipment on my home network. It's a win-win-win with reduced hardware costs, lower complexity, and more broadly available components.
g=
The whole "Macs are comparable to PCs" thing stopped being true like five years ago when Apple decided to forget that they were a computer company and concentrate on iDevices. Their current top-end computers are something like two generations behind the current latest-and-greatest, the graphics cards in their Macs are either the same two generation old Intel integrated graphics or even older AMD or Nvidia GPUs, depending on model.
So, yeah - it's trivial to beat a Mac these days, because Apple has entirely stopped caring about the Mac.
It's hard to see where they're focusing on these days. iOS has been allowed to languish. iOS 9 was supposed to be a "polish" release that was focused on fixing bugs and resolving old issues. It didn't. iPhones appear to have picked up the wifi issues that plague Macs and routinely drop wifi and refuse to connect. The iOS home screen appears buggier than ever and will routinely freeze on you. Siri is just as useless as she ever was and while Apple Maps may have finally gotten a database of points of interest so you can at least find places you want to go, their routing software is still useless and their POIs still contain hilarious gaps.
For example, Apple Maps contains the Apple Store nearest to me - but NOT the mall that Apple Store is located in. If you try and use Apple Maps to navigate to that Apple Store, it will continually try and find routes to the middle of the mall where the store is but since you can't actually drive through the mall you'll never "arrive" so it will keep on giving driving instructions around the mall. (It's actually kind of hilarious, because it'll tell you it's going to route you to the "closest point" it can and then when you arrive there rather than say "you've arrived!" it immediately plots a route back to that point.)
I have a Mac for work and it's the most annoying thing ever. I routinely have to reboot it to get it to stay connected to wifi. Really the only thing going for it is the retina display, and Windows is finally (finally!) catching up in that area. You can get Windows laptops with 4K displays in them. (Not MacBooks, though.) I remember when the MacBook trackpad was by far the best trackpad I ever used - but Windows laptops caught up, and now the OS X trackpad is horrible because the "click" is now done via some sort of software-triggered force feedback thing. Which is a problem because when OS X is lagging, which is often, the click stops, so you can't tell you "clicked."
Bottom line here is that while Apple may have, at one point produced quality laptop/desktop hardware that was on par or even better than anything in the PC world, those days are long past. Anyone saying otherwise is deluding themselves.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
if you peek under the hood at OS X, it is VASTLY more robust than ChromeOS, being a Certified UNIX and all
Ha ha ha, you're quite the joker. No Unix tool in better on OS/x than Linux and most are crappier... way crappier. Valgrind? Yes, Real Unix[tm] has it, the catch is, it doesn't work. The list of similar farces is long. Face it, these days Real Unix[tm] gets the sloppy seconds from Linux, it's been that way for, oh I don't know, 15 years now? More?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
of course you can build a PC from parts for much less than a prebuilt machine such as a mac. ho hum. companies assemble components and mark finished items up for profit, news at eleven.
find me a PREBUILT computer, from a sizable vendor, with equivalent hardware AND EQUIVALENT BUILD QUALITY, that is significantly cheaper than a comparable mac. not as easy, eh?
I would have thought this would be the case years ago, give the price disparity.
Peace, or Not?
if you peek under the hood at OS X, it is VASTLY more robust than ChromeOS, being a Certified UNIX and all
Ha ha ha, you're quite the joker. No Unix tool in better on OS/x than Linux and most are crappier... way crappier. Valgrind? Yes, Real Unix[tm] has it, the catch is, it doesn't work. The list of similar farces is long. Face it, these days Real Unix[tm] gets the sloppy seconds from Linux, it's been that way for, oh I don't know, 15 years now? More?
Now, go to a BSD forum and post that. I'll wait...
That is a true statement for any value of X.
As I've discovered recently, there really is no better alternative for the educational market, and certainly not for middle school. Those kids are merciless when it comes to hardware and software, and they will most certainly fuck it up even if it's locked down tight. To give you an example, my kid has found a bug in Windows 7 whereby you could make Windows treat _any_ file (even *.exe) as if it was a text file and open it in Notepad. Laptop was locked down with administrative policy, so this is not something I could fix. If he had a Chromebook, it literally wouldn't even be possible to have this problem.
Wow amazing a $199 product outsells a $999 to $1499 product?
ZOMG Apple is DYING!
Tomorrow on Slashdot, The Honda Civic is the worlds best Sports car because it outsells alone every single Ferrari model made.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Centrino didn't come out until like 2005. It was a packaging of the Pentium-M (Which was the Israeli rework of the Pentium 3 core with a slightly longer pipeline, P4 FSB and better reclocking support) with an Intel motherboard chipset and Intel wifi. The badging continued to be used on the core/core2 generation of hardware, then either was discontinued or faded in popularity.
Mid 90s pentium era was 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, K5, Pentium-MMX, K6, P2, P3, Athlon (Might have been post-millenium)
Apple is a ghost ship now.
Tim is the worst.
Please fire him.
For ages, there have been less problems with malware on Macs than on Windows PCs.
For ages, one main excuse for this has been "more people use Windows, so it's naturally a bigger target". Technical arguments about vulnerability are dismissed by people who make this argument.
OK, so now in Chromebook we have a new malware target which may be both bigger than the Mac market AND theoretically less vulnerable.
This could be amusing...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Well, you can always turn that around too. I defy you to find an equivalent Mac to a standard tower PC with a similar level of expandability and upgrade-ability at any price.