Are Chromebooks Responsible For PC Market Growth? (theverge.com)

From a report on The Verge: IDC claims the PC market is "up slightly," recording its first growth in five years. It's a tiny growth of just 0.6 percent, but it's a flattening of the market that Microsoft and its PC maker partners have been looking for after years of decline. While percentage growth looks good on paper, it doesn't always tell the whole story. Over at Gartner, another market research firm that tracks PC sales, the story is a little different. Gartner claims PC shipments declined 2.4 percent in the recent quarter. There's a good reason for the disparity between IDC and Gartner's figures, and it involves Chromebooks. IDC's data includes Chromebooks and excludes Windows tablets, even machines with a detachable keyboard like the Surface Pro. Gartner counts Windows-based tablets as PCs and excludes Chromebooks or any non-Windows-based tablets. Without IDC providing the exact split of Chromebooks sold vs. Windows- and macOS-based machines, it's impossible to know exactly how well Google's low-cost laptops are selling. However, IDC also claims that Chromebooks are doing well with businesses. The US commercial PC market "came out strong mostly backed by growth of Chromebooks," says IDC. Gartner has no opinion on Chromebooks as the company refuses to track them as PCs.

Comments

Re: Not a dumb terminal - Linux with locked down U

[drinkypoo]

Very little functionality exists on these Chromebooks (making them dumb).

The amount of functionality included in bundled apps isn't what makes a device smart or dumb. It's the extensibility.

They are nothing more than the modern equivalent of a VT100.

That's completely false. You clearly have never owned a VT100. My first glass terminal (that I owned) was a VT100-AA. It didn't have the ability to run any kind of code locally aside from what is in ROM. The only settings were for tab stops and communications parameters.

Not only does Chromium on ChromeOS have a[n admittedly limited] built in shell, but you can add app-like functionality to it. For example, there is a GUI SSH client addon. And if you enable developer mode then you can tamper with the system, whether installing busybox or a full Linux environment via Crouton. This is not a complete reinstallation, but a chrooted Linux install using the existing kernel.