“Google’s Chromebook was dismissed as a bare-bones laptop with limited appeal when it debuted two years ago. Now it’s defying skeptics and gaining share as the rest of the personal-computer market shrinks. Chromebooks have in just the past eight months snagged 20 percent to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops that cost less than $300, according to NPD Group Inc. The devices, which have a full keyboard and get regular software updates from Google, are the fastest-growing part of the PC industry based on price, NPD said.”
I owned one for 6 months to investigate it’s feasibility of use within my company (i personally purchased the machine). (Nov 2012 – May 2013). It was the Samsung ARM variant for £220.
I thought the machine worked really well, i could see us deploying it as a quick machine with no overhead, regarding updates, user profiles etc.. as users would simply log in with their google accounts.
The offline worked well, i used to be able to do a lot of work on the train which didn’t have an internet connection.
The places were it did fall down was on logging in and security offline. I used two factor security with my google account and sometimes it would log off or restart itself, logging back in without an internet connection was a pain and usually couldn’t be done.
I can see the use of these devices, for business and consumer, like i said earlier, zero config, easy to maintain, generally well made and very cheap. The battery also lasted for ages/hours.
However it really comes down to what you want to use it for. Anything remotely heavy and it’s not the laptop for you.
so chromebooks took 25% of the collapsed netbook-market?
doesn’t sound that impressive to me
Edited 2013-07-11 09:52 UTC
FTA: Chromebooks are also benefiting as the market for laptops that cost less than $300 is set to grow more than 10 percent in 2013, Baker said.
A segment that grows, at a time when the whole PC market contracts by 11% according to IDC[1] is not a bad place to operate in. This also means that the $300+ market collapses much faster.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57593170-92/lenovo-tops-hp-amid-we…
Meanwhile they are a non factor in ultraportables thats due to explode in the next few years.
To put things in perspective, they control 3% of the total market. Thats up 2% YoY, which is still impressive but not as misleading as 25% of the netbook market.
The problem with competing on price is that once Microsoft lowers their prices, their value proposition evaporates. Look at Linux Netbooks for a refresher.
The article claims 4-5% share, up from 1-2% in 2012.
Interestingly the Chromebooks do not only compete on price. Being almost maintenance-free is a big part of the equation.
Just bought a new printer, and was interested that Epson specifically supports printing from Chrome. Also works well from iOS and Android (we tried both), and of course desktop Linux (check), Macs, and even (they claim) Windows 8. 😉
What do you mean by “once microsoft lowers their prices”? You mean, once microsoft lowers their prices again? Or did microsoft raise there prices again after the netbook market died off and are now poised to lower it again?
I thought winRT was the Microsoft answer to Chrome, but they haven’t been very successful with that strategy.
Edit:
By “successful” I mean in terms of getting OEM’s to introduce new models. I would like to see a sales number comparison of WinRT devices vs Chome. It would be fairly interesting.
Edited 2013-07-11 14:05 UTC
I think people you’re forgetting that it’s a different market compared to a little over 5 years, Microsoft’s stranglehold on the OEMs has gotten very loose. When the netbooks with Linux arrived on the market the reason they used Linux was that Vista was such a resource hog. Windows XP wasn’t being sold anymore until Microsoft reacted to the Netbook’s popularity so they offered XP again for the netbooks and suddenly most netbooks sold in North America was Windows only.
Today, Windows is able to run on the hardware the chromebook uses yet these devices are shipping with Chrome OS.
We also see that OEMs are proposing laptops that dual boot Windows 8 and Android, something we would not have seen 10 years ago. I’m thinking of BEOS that was supposed to be shipped in dual boot on some Toshiba laptops until Microsoft objected.
Of course, Microsoft recently became a hardware manufacturer when they started to sell Surface tablets putting them in competition with their partners. This was probably a major wake up call for OEMs to diversify away from Microsoft which is why they are committing to the ChromeOS and Android. Just look at the way they stabbed their partners in the MP3 player markey when they offered the Zune. The OEMs need only to see that to realize that their partner could pull a fast one on them at any time.
Microsoft could give copies of Windows 8 to the OEMs, they’re not going to stop the ChromeOS. If these devices sell well, the companies making them are not going to be stopped by Microsoft this time.
where does it say that the <300$ markt is growing?
Its dumb. ChromeOS barely even registers on any kind of web usage statistics. This is perhaps strong sequential growth which is good and may indicate a trend, but its by no means taking the PC world by storm.
Even Surface shipments likely outnumber Chromebooks. Thats somehow a colossal failure while this is a roaring success.
It’s probably true that they have a massive YoY growth!
😉
I quoted the Bloomberg article for you already. Let me do it again, this time in bold:
“Chromebooks are also benefiting as the market for laptops that cost less than $300 is set to grow more than 10 percent in 2013, Baker said. “
sorry, but is there anyting to back up his claims?
all i see is a piece of opinion
when i take a look at whats available in this lowest-price segment i don’t get the feeling that thats a market with high grow rates
more like stagnant at best
That Stephen Baker who is quoted in the article is an analyst for the market research firm NPD Group. These firms typically collect sales data from various sources (manufacturers, distributors, retailers) and make forecasts based on that data. Unless you are a high-paying customer, you probably won’t see any of it.
Do you think that you can make better predictions than the market research firms?
of course
my prediction:
the alleged 10% growth is only a small hickup (at best)
the people who bought a netbook 5 years ago and didn’t transition to tablets are now in the market for a new model
thats a rather small group and the only reason why the short-term 10% look so big is because that segment went through a drought for the last 2-3 years
Oh, you of the small faith
:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Chrome-OS-Chromebook-Windows-8-Jim…
ACER OEM statement about situation in US.
5-10% of US based SHIPMENTS for Acer. (Not “netbook”, not “notebook”, just all of them)
Which if you look at Acers anemic shipments, is only a few hundred thousand units. Quite the success. /s
He works for an independent research company like gartner, forester or the others. Its their business to do the difficult research to figure things like this out, often without the companies direct help. I doubt that they would necessarily divulge their research methods. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are correct, but its more than a random guy’s.
If the claim of growth in the market was vital to your companies livelyhood, I’d recommend finding a second source.
Apparently she uses chroot to switch back and forth between Chrome OS and KDE on a Chromebook Pixel.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130707160346164
PJ:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel
Seems like a reasonable way to get a high-end laptop and yet completely avoid Windows.
Edited 2013-07-11 10:25 UTC
You have always been able to buy a macbook if you want a highend laptop and to avoid windows…
Don’t mind lemur, he’s a walking talking KDE billboard.
Look who’s talking.
Right, so I’m trying to see what makes him so different? Because I am constantly chastisized, called a paid shill, etc for doing much less than this.
He obviously engages in bald faced evangelism often invading threads where the subject matter has nothing to do with KDE.
Yes, but MacBooks were not really designed to run Linux. So sometimes you had problems with WiFi, Power management, Thunderbolt, etc. Besides, there is no MacBook that has a touchscreen yet.
Maybe I am missing something, but running Mac OS X is a way to avoid Windows it is not?
Not only that… Linux runs really nice for me on my macs inside vmware…
It kinda sucks if you don’t specifically want OS X.
Then don’t buy a Mac, there are plenty of vendors that will sell you a PC with Linux already installed.
Which is exactly the point.
No, she runs it on $200 Acer C7.
As it stands the article reads like Googlevertisement more than anything else:
1) It’s about the U.S. market;
2) It’s about “laptops that cost less than $300”
Now, how many of these sub $300 laptops have been sold across the board? How much is 20-25% of that? We don’t know and they’re not saying, but we can probably take an educated guess by looking at the data for 2Q13 shipments from IDC at http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24213513 (scroll down to the table about United States PC Shipments).
Of the top five vendors in that table Acer is the only one producing Chromebooks in the sub $300 range (the Acer C7) as both Lenovo’s and HP’s offerings are a bit higher than that, Samsung’s cheaper Chromebooks are harder and harder to find, and the Pixel is in another category altogether (https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices).
Well, if that data is to be trusted, Acer is down 19.5% compared to 2Q12 and shipped a total of 909,000 units (desktops, portables, mini notebooks and workstations). How many of these 909,000 units were “mini netbooks”? How many of them were actual Chromebooks? We still don’t know but, even assuming that all of them were Chromebooks, that would translate to about 227,000 units — a very generous, best case scenario figure.
Just to put things in perspective: Nokia sold 5.6 million Lumias in 1Q13 (http://press.nokia.com/2013/04/18/nokia-corporation-q1-2013-interim…) and most people went “meh”. In other words, I rest my case and duly proceed to tag the linked article “Googlevertisement”. 😉
RT.