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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.
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.
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.
After all the attempts to include tablets in PC sales figures to bolster Apple's standing, I figure turnabout is fair play. Having helped set up my nephew's Chromebook (sis wanted parental controls), aside from the inability to run generic apps I'd say it's more PC-like than a tablet. The physical keyboard goes a long way, and most people spend their computer time in a browser anyway.
The iPads in education were probably a kickback scam. The Chromebooks actually seem useful. A part of my nephew's homework is found online (I suppose it could be made into an interactive program, but a website allows easier control of distribution and updates). More work for IT, a lot less work for teachers and parents. They cost about 1/3 to 1/2 what an iPad does. And the lack of a store discourages kids from trying to hack it to install Angry Birds. Course they can browse to all sorts of websites (Google needs to improve the parental controls - you can eventually restrict it, but the process isn't trivial), but they can also do that on a tablet's browser.
If you think about it, Chromebooks have more or less accomplished what OLPC set out to do - driven the price of a production computer through the floor so that even people in developing countries could afford one. OLPC's actual production cost was about $490 each. (And please, no ranting about 16 GB of flash being "limiting." My first computer had 32 kB of RAM, my first laptop had a 20 MB HDD. 16 GB is enormous. OLPC only had 4-8 GB of flash storage. A compressed version of Wikipedia is 12 GB.)
As a member of a razor-thin IT staff in a public K-12 US school district, we love Chromebooks; they are dead simple to manage, easy to use and inexpensive (even with a 3-year warranty). Do they improve quality of education and grades? Probably no more or less than a good pen and paper. It's just another way to get thoughts down and presentable to the teachers.
Consider the source. This is the same IDC that announced US Mac sales suffered a 1.7% slump when they had actually grown 18% not too long ago. Granted, that was an extreme outlier, but it bears repeating that estimates don't always match reality, particularly when it comes to IDC, since they have an established and documented history of publishing reports that flatter their clients while downplaying the competition. The link above gives details on a number of other irregularities in IDC's data and methodology over the years prior to the incident I cited, such as millions of unverified sales from "other" vendors appearing out of thin air to suppress market share growth in the competition and their history of double-dipping by finding ways to count their clients' products in more than one category while inventing reasons why the competing products are only counted in one category.
Even with all of that said, however, I do expect that the numbers aren't too far off one way or the other, given that Apple itself posted a YOY decline in Mac sales and have had either nonexistent or lackluster updates to their Mac lines so far this year (e.g. only the MacBook has gotten a minor speed bump, whereas the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air haven't gotten their usual updates by now, though that may indicate more significant improvements at WWDC next month).