U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/u-s-commercial-channel-computing-device-sales-set-to-end-2013-with-double-digit-growth-according-to-npd/

by BvS • 13 years ago

39 24 13 years ago

npd.com

MBCook• 13 years ago

And yet, as Gruber points out, they are just a rounding error in web browser usage. [1] If they're that successful, why don't Chromebooks appear in usage stats?

1. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

Because the stat is unreliable.

gress2• 13 years ago

How is it unreliable, and how is the margin of error so bad that these are a no-show?

alistairSH• 13 years ago

That. Or, people buy Chromebooks, realize they're no better than the [tablet|"real" laptop|PC] they already own, and don't use them much?

fauigerzigerk• 13 years ago

If anything Gruber points out that Chrome OS isn't being counted.

mpweiher• 13 years ago

...in "commercial markets". As far as I can tell, that does not include consumer and would make the headline extremely misleading.

So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.

tristanz• 13 years ago

I have no idea if 21% is correct, but on Amazon Chromebooks are 4 of the 5 top selling laptops. Something is going on.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...

azakai2• 13 years ago

Yes, the title is misleading. But it's already been picked up by dozens of news sites, hit the front page of reddit etc., so it's probably hopeless to debunk at this point.

It's a shame because the numbers do actually show a very large increase in ChromeBook sales, but the tech press has focused on numbers that exaggerate and distort that.

chippy• 13 years ago

Depends on definition of "notebook".

I would assume it is different from laptop, netbook, ultabook and tablet.

azakai2• 13 years ago

No, it appears to be identical to "laptop" actually. Based on other news reports that use the same NPD data. Definitely an easy to misunderstand term, but maybe it's the norm in the commercial sector which is what they cover here, not the entire market?

gkoberger• 13 years ago

Bought Chromebooks (and Chromecasts) for all my tech-illiterate family members in order to cut down on having to provide tech support, and it's been amazing. No issues so far, and everything just works.

I think that actually is just fine for most companies -- less tech support, and does everything they need (collaborative documents, email, web searches, etc).

gregwebs• 13 years ago

I suggested that a 65 year old I knew that frequently had computer issues (and asked me for support) but only surfed the web and used gmail consider getting a Chromebook. Several months after the purchase I was thanked and told it was working out great. E-mail is an important point: typing anything more than a sentence on an iPad isn't very nice.

My suggestions to consider using OS X rather than Windows have never worked because there are no low-cost OS X options.

roma1n2• 13 years ago

Great! Now, where are the mid-range chromebooks? With a decent display and some additional processing power?

arianvanp• 13 years ago

Check out the Pixel[0]. It has a great display but is horribly overpriced in my opinion

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pix...

roma1n2• 13 years ago

Sure :)

I was hoping for something between the Rolls and the Yugo

MAGZine• 13 years ago

Why is the pixel "horribly overpriced"? The hardware is better than a MBA, imo. If there were drivers for win 8, it would be my next notebook.

DonGateley• 13 years ago

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever.

There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.

Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.

YokoZar• 13 years ago

Alternatively, computing power will get so cheap and easy to distribute that myriad small devices will be fetching saved data from the cloud and running the app locally with all the better latency that entails.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

Much as I appreciate a fat (Linux) client, the challenge is less device cost than administration.

The Android + Cloud model gives you a highly uniform user client which access all the fiddly bits in the Cloud. Until there's an absolutely bulletproof way of providing those services at the individually-provisioned level, that's going to win out for the vast majority of the public.

I'm not saying that the services have to remain as centralized as they are presently -- with Google owning everything (though this provides certain efficiencies). A more federated model in which there are multiple app and/or service providers to choose from _could_ come into being, and the present surveillance environment might help such an environment emerge, but the efficiencies of size and scale (as well as the very thin margins of such services) make this a stretch.

I've been watching a number of projects, most notably FreedomBox, for some time. They're pretty much precisely what you've described: cheap, self-contained, self-provisioning systems based around Linux (usually Debian and its excellent provisioning system), but there's been little noise out of the projects and progress seems slow at best.

If I could run my own servers (on an existing high-speed and highly reliable connection) without much hassle, it really would be quite attractive.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

The success of Chromebooks should put a question mark over some of the newcomer mobile OSs. Chromebooks illustrate that the sweet spot for Web apps is a big screen, a keyboard, and a pointing device. That's partly because the Web was not designed for finger touch.

If your mobile OS relies on Web apps, you might want to think about adding Android compatibility, as Jolla has done even though Sailfish also runs Qt apps.

U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

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