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: Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes you think.

Interesting Philosophical Question: What is a PC?

[mykepredko]

In our business (Mimetics), we use Chromebooks a lot and the low end Chromebooks (2 GByte DDR & 16GByte SSD) are excellent for our application (Chrome Extension) as well as a classroom tool for students. I would argue that Chromebooks are better in the classroom than traditional PCs and I can see many applications where ChromeOS devices would be a better solution in a work environment than a traditional PC.

But, I would be reluctant to call a ChromeOS device as a "PC" because:
- They need to have a network connection to access user data
- Local file systems (ie USB drives) are absolutely painful to access and work with (the paradigm is to use GDrive storage and anything else is work)
- There simply isn't enough memory/drive space available for anything other Extensions which are measured in the low tens of MBytes
- Applications are limited to Javascript (although I'm hoping Webassembly will be an option in the near future) with browser built in debug tools with a somewhat convoluted load/test process. A full featured IDE for application development is nothing more than a dream at this point

A surface table, which can operate on its own, generally has many 10s to 100s of Gbytes of storage and can run traditional apps, even without keyboards seems ore likely to match the traditional definition of a "PC".

Re:What's a PC? Also, WTF, IDC?

[rickb928]

My Surface Pro 3 is my PC. My only personal PC. I have an Android tablet and smartphone, but the Surface Pro 3 is my PC.

IDC can play that game, but they are not offering the best information. Sad.

All my Surface Pro lacks is dual-boot, which I've avoided just to avoid munging it too much, and I have a VM running Ubuntu for stuff I need to get done. Workd fine.

For those of you who may be confused, the Surface Pro 3 is a PC.

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

[drinkypoo]

So a ChromeBook is like the games console of Google cloud stuff.

That's not true at all. The ChromeBook is not even close to being as locked down as a games console. You don't need to give anyone money or even get anyone's software blessing to put your ChromeBook into developer mode, at which point you can load whatever you want onto it. You just have to [effectively] do a little dance, which is slightly annoying but not prohibitive. And since you can run Android apps on a Chromebook, and those apps include more than just gaming or audiovisual entertainment apps, it's clearly a general-purpose computer.