Chromebooks on Fire

http://recode.net/2014/04/30/chromebooks-on-fire-the-coming-consumer-cloud-revolution/

by msh • 12 years ago

35 43 12 years ago

recode.net

VMG2• 12 years ago

Deliberately misleading title?

thirsteh• 12 years ago

Deliberately misleading image? That isn't even a Chromebook!

sciurus• 12 years ago

on fire

[snip]

3. Fig. Inf. doing very well; very enthusiastic. Jill's new book is really on fire. Everyone is buying it. Fred is on fire in his new job. He'll get promoted in no time.

VMG2• 12 years ago

I'm aware of that, however the literal meaning could easily have also applied here.

cmelbye2• 12 years ago

Edited/inaccurate title. The actual title from the article is: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."

Rylinks• 12 years ago

I thought the article would be about a battery problem

wfjackson4• 12 years ago

That makes it doubly ironic because there was an issue with the chargers that could start a fire resulting in a recall.

http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/entry/hp-and-google-re...

coreymgilmore• 12 years ago

I believe Chromebooks should be seriously looked at for almost any circumstance.

For businesses, it is a cheap enough to be a "throw away" and I would rather manage a Terminal Server (RDS nowadays) or cloud apps than many individual laptops. Centralizing the support of laptops alone could save huge amounts of time and money.

For education, the normal alternative is MacBooks. But would it not be more financially responsible to the tax payers to buy Chromebooks instead? Again, they are throw away devices due to the price and it should be assumed students will damage the laptops they are give. Finally, centralized control and management yet again.

For individuals, I see almost no reason not to use a Chromebook. Yes, some people prefer legacy apps and need some beefy hardware to encode videos, but most users are the target market: web browsers who write a document once in a while.

Obviously, each of these circumstances proves more difficult if constant internet access is not possible. But given the world today this should only be an issue for a very small selection of buyers.

lotharbot• 12 years ago

My elementary school bought 30 iPads last year. For about the same price, they bought 85 chromebooks this year. We can check out iPads to one classroom, or chromebooks to an entire grade level. With similar capabilities, this seems like a no-brainer.

On the other hand, there are a lot more exceptions than you describe. Many end users need beefy hardware, not just to encode video, but to run games or to crunch data or to compile code. For people whose main use case is web browsers and documents, sure, chromebooks (or tablet-dock combos like the ASUS Transformer line) are a great fit.

IBM• 12 years ago

Chromebooks aren't just competing with laptops, they also have to compete with tablets. Consumers/education/business are much more likely to buy iPads over Chromebooks because of the much better software ecosystem. Most of Google's services have apps on iOS so I can't really think of why someone would choose a Chromebook over an iPad unless they were completely price sensitive (the cheapest iPad is $300, the HP Chromebook 11 is $280). I think the success of touchscreen smartphones shows that it's not going to be the hardware keyboard that drives people to it.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Half of the people I see using tablets in public have (bluetooth) keyboards attached. I think that Chromebooks have quite an opportunity to displace tablets for those actually trying to get work done.

Wilya• 12 years ago

If you categorize all desktop apps ever made as "legacy", sure, it's hard to see why people wouldn't use a Chromebook.

On the other hand, non-technical users are happily torrenting shows and movies, playing 3D-intensive games on Steam, making somewhat decent-looking documents with Word, making gifs with a pirate copy of Photoshop, etc.

A Chromebook offers (generally inferior) alternatives for some of these tasks, but not even all of them.

j2kun6• 12 years ago

If your standard is "gifs in photoshop" and "somewhat decent documents in Word" then you clearly haven't seen the web alternatives to "all desktop apps ever made." Saying you need Photoshop to make gifs is like saying you need the US nuclear stockpile for mall security.

I have a Chromebook and regularly use it to write beautiful LaTeX documents, decent documents/spreadsheets in Drive, wonderful charts on plot.ly, on-the-go programming in any language I need, and all photo editing I've ever needed in the browser. They even have javascript torrent apps these days.

lucid003• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call people that torrent shows and movies, pirate copies of Photoshop and play 3D-intensive games on Steam "non-technical users".

That's clearly not the target audience.

chestnut-tree2• 12 years ago

I would never use or recommend a Chromebook for one main reason: ChromeOS tracks everything you do online. Does Google disable online tracking for school users? If not, Google must be rubbing their hands with glee at all the data they're collecting.

Yes, I know that Google doesn't do nefarious things with the data they collect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't scrutinise the way they track online behaviour so relentlessly. Even printing to your desktop printer in ChromeOS is recorded by Google because all print jobs go through Google's cloud print service.

If people thought their Linux, Windows or Mac Operating System was constantly logging their actions and sending back the details to the OS vendor, they'd be angry. When companies ask for app usage data they do so on the promise that it's anonymous and they tell you what they are recording and why. Google tell you nothing and you're not even anonymous (you have to sign in with a Google account to use Chrome OS. A guest account gives you limited access and even that's probably being tracked).

How does Google get such a free ride on such matters? The response from the tech community generally seems to be "meh - it's a non-issue, I'm fine with Google collecting my data". I find it pretty depressing.

lucid003• 12 years ago

Chrome OS tracks what you do as much as Chrome does, which isn't as much as it's hyped up to be and is optional.

Plus Windows 8 somewhat does the same thing (built in Microsoft accounts, OneDrive integration, bookmark syncing, crash reporting, etc...).

_zen• 12 years ago

Note to self, sensationalized media to ignore in the future: recode.net

jreed91• 12 years ago

My old school district bought chrome books for all of the kids in the district. They just had a recent report saying they have a 30% failure rate with them. The majority are screen breaks from heavy books on top of them. They are great machines but the cheap materials come at a cost.

blacktulip• 12 years ago

I guess one day Google will give out Chromebooks for free in exchange for all the data going through them

cmelbye2• 12 years ago

Title from the article: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."

wfjackson4• 12 years ago

They are the best selling laptops in the U.S., yet no one dares write about their rise.

Or perhaps they're not. If they were, you'd see a big rise in web browsing stats. Amazon doesn't sell all that many laptops, and there are relatively fewer models of Chromebooks.

Take the top 1000 best selling laptops on Amazon, total up the numbers as Chromebooks, Windows and Macs, and I seriously doubt Chromebooks would be selling better even on Amazon. Talk about cherry picking statistics and then say "no one dares to write about their rise". Actually no one with a reputation right dares to write such unresearched garbage.

The writer might as well declare Nexus phones as the best selling phones in the US because they are #1 on the Play Store. I was expecting better from Mossberg and Kara Swisher's Re/code and I am sorely disappointed about the misleading flamebait.

nazgulnarsil• 12 years ago

Why are you speculating when numbers are available? http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-sur...

wfjackson4• 12 years ago

Because the article you quote doesn't have any numbers beyond 21%.

First, 21% does not mean "top selling". And the 21% does not include consumer sales, nor PCs sold by OEMs, such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, directly to businesses.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245212/Analysts_blas...

Google knows the real numbers but doesn't want to reveal them. If they're the top selling laptops in the US why not? The article you quote is just shoddy reporting dressed up as numbers and it's sad to see people fall for it. The headline is just flat out wrong.

j2kun6• 12 years ago

This is not a fair comparison. Is Dickens didn't write a best selling book because the total number of all the Harry Potter books sold exceeds A Tale of Two Cities in number? Or worse, that the total volume of sales of trashy formula-written romance novels exceeds it?

Moreover, sales of a notebook with a preloaded operating system doesn't measure operating system use. I have immediately reformatted every "Windows" machine I've ever bought. Just because they're sold with Windows (or Chromebook, or OS X) doesn't mean they stay that way.

wfjackson4• 12 years ago

Are you saying "Top selling laptops on Amazon"

is equivalent to

"best selling laptops in the U.S." ?

How is that a fair comparison?

shortformblog• 12 years ago

Misleading headline aside, the article's sentiment is on-point. It's where the low end of the market is going, and the use cases are becoming common enough that they make sense for a lot of different kinds of consumers.

I replaced my wife's netbook with a $199 Acer Chromebook about six months ago, and it's simply a better experience. It does less, but it does less well. I'm still way happier with my MBP, but I know that I'm not the target audience.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

Chromebooks are great, and for the same money most Windows computers seem bigger, uglier, and worse. That being said, this sort of hype and praise reminds me of netbooks. They were all the rage and they really took off. Now they're almost all completely gone.

Same price point, similar usage patterns. I wonder if it will be a similar outcome.

j2kun6• 12 years ago

Most Chromebooks these days would have been called netbooks back then. People still comment on how small my Chromebook is compared to their disgustingly gargantuan Dell laptops.

jsnell2• 12 years ago

They are the best selling laptops in the U.S., yet no one dares write about their rise.

What? There's certainly no lack of "daring". There have been a ton of people making arguments about how Chromebooks must be doing incredibly well, based on the Amazon top sellers list. Or some other tiny slice of the market. None of the articles, including this one, has made a good case for Chromebooks having any significant market share overall.

If they're really selling well, you'd expect either Google or some manufacturer to brag about the numbers. (In the early days of Android, senior Google leadership couldn't go for a month without coming up with new numbers on Android sales). If they're selling well and being actually used, you'd expect people to actually use them for web browsing. It's not like they can do anything else. But nobody is reporting a significant proportion of ChromeOS users. The most recent report I saw had desktop Linux as 10x more used than ChromeOS, and growing as fast in relative terms: http://chitika.com/insights/2014/chrome-os-long-term

kentonv• 12 years ago

Whoa, according to the graph in your link, Desktop Linux is on fire -- increasing its share by 73% in a 4-month period (1.1% to 1.9%).

As much as I'd like that to be true, it seems far-fetched. Is there any explanation for these numbers? (No, I don't want to pay for their full report...)

jsnell2• 12 years ago

I don't know the details of their methodology either. The delta is certainly high, maybe suspiciously so. Most likely it's a combination of multiple factors:

1. Actual increased Linux usage

2. Reduction in Windows usage (replaced by mobiles / tablets)

3. Systematic measurement errors, for example a change in which websites use their ad network.

For a different data set, here's a plot of a few years of StatCounter global desktop usage data (just Linux and ChromeOS), http://jsnell.iki.fi/tmp/statcounter.png . There are definitely 5 month periods there that could be used to show similar absurd growth ratios, but the overall growth is a lot slower that that (even if clearly trending upwards). Even so, on the whole the numbers look pretty consistent with my first link.

j2kun6• 12 years ago

Perhaps that's because the chart's axis is specifically for "Desktop web traffic"? It'd be a face-palm-worthy case of lying with statistics if true, but all the charts I can see from Chitika specify that they only use "desktop-based" web traffic. You can't help but wonder...

And even then, the ease of installing linux on a Chromebook might confound some of these numbers.

nraynaud• 12 years ago

I'm thinking about using them to control milling machines. they are cheap, so if you break them there is no real drama, and they have a real screen.

pjmlp5• 12 years ago

They are the best selling laptops in the U.S., yet no one dares write about their rise.

May be but only there, because I travel across Europe on my consulting projects and never seen anyone using one.

cagey• 12 years ago

Factory refurbs of the (current model) Acer C720 Chromebook, having quite good Amazon reviews, have been available for 150USD for well over a month (variously from Acer as Amazon reseller or on Ebay). I have purchased 2 of these (my first Chromebooks), initially to replace WinXP laptops used by family members mostly for web-related purposes. They are (for us, within their limits) truly utilitarian and appliance-like in ways that a standard laptop has not been.

Anyway, my suspicion is that this (ongoing, very well-received refurb sale) is an echo: that large quantities of these were sold during the previous Xmas holiday period, with a significant percentage of gift-givers/-recipients being unaware of the core nature of the item (instead concluding from appearance that it is "a laptop PC" (with a low price)), and, when confronted with reality, deciding to return it.

Chromebooks on Fire

Related Stories