Limitations and All, Chromebooks Appear To Be Selling 126
puddingebola writes "A number of different websites are commenting on NPD's consumer research numbers that claim Chromebooks are getting 20-25% of the sub-$300 PC market. From the article: 'The NPD says that Google's Chromebook has now gained 20 to 25 percent of the sub-$300 laptop market in the U.S. That's a huge gain for a computer that's only been on the market for two years. It's even more impressive when you consider that Chromebooks were seen as nothing but a self-serving experiment on the part of Google for the first year of their existence.' Stephen Vaughan-Nichols is also blogging about this over at ZDnet. While the PC market shrank again in the second quarter of 2013, Chromebooks seem to have grown."
How big is the market? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen these percentages reported a lot of places, but I have yet to be able to find anything that lists actual sales numbers. Without knowing how big the market for sub-$300 PC market is, it's a meaningless measurement. For example, if 50 million sub-$300 PCs were sold, 25% is a really respectable number. If two million sub-$300 PCs were sold then the 500,000 total sales are quite disappointing.
Re:Sounds good until Google pulls the plug (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they wouldn't.
Killing Reader doesn't mean Google is shutting down all of their products. Reader is the only "important" project they've shut down and that's only because we are all nerds and used Reader constantly. Most people on the internet don't use RSS or even know what it is.
Chromebooks are one of the major pieces of Google's ecosystem. There's no way they will be shut down or neglected unless Google completely changes its business model. At that point we will have more to complain about than Google shutting down a few products.
Cap (Score:5, Insightful)
People's data is generally safer in the cloud than locally.
At $10 per gigabyte to upload and $10 per gigabyte to download over a cellular network in the United States, this safety has a substantial cost associated with it.
Re:But it IS self-serving (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that anybody is arguing that Chromebooks aren't a self-serving product for Google, just that they are a popular-with-users self-serving product for Google.
As best I can tell, Google has diffused most of the serious-nerd hate by making it pretty trivial(not supported as in 'sure, we'll be happy to do customer support for your custom linux distro'; but supported as in 'there are official directions on how to bypass the Google-Blessed payload and boot your own') to turn them into quite competent(and very cheap) full linux machines if you don't like the 'chromebook' stuff, and the less serious end of the market (A) doesn't actually care all that much and (b) is choosing between multiple self-serving products, not between utopian products and self-serving products.
Microsoft can't kill off its legacy OSes overnight, so scoring a Win7 system isn't rocket science; but 8 and 8.1(doubly so for RT) make it abundantly clear that the Redomond Future is app stores, Microsoft accounts, and Skydrive integration. Over in Cupertino, your iOS device makes the app store and Apple Account Exciting and Mandatory!, while your OSX device starts at $1000(barring only the mini, which isn't portable and doesn't even come with pack-in peripherals, making it a questionable buy for consumers, though attractive for lab/kiosk type work) and makes it increasingly clear that anything outside the app store is a second class citizen. Plus, of course, be it Windows or OSX, probably a good half of the users are going to have Gmail open pretty much all the time anyway, so they aren't exactly shying away from Google even if they choose otherwise.
None of the major vendors give a damn about your desire(if you have one, and a good many people don't) to be free of the mothership, so it's understandable why Google's limited(but stalwartly idiot-proof) and crazy cheap offering would be popular.
Re:But it IS self-serving (Score:4, Insightful)
Find me one product in any market that is not self serving.
Buy a dozen eggs, the farmer not only uses the money to feed the chickens, but his own children as well as buying new shoes and maybe some beer.
Its all self serving.
And your discussion of nice and nicer without reference to price is totally non-helpful.
The real problem that I see with chromebooks and the whole cloud storage issue is that the law basically says anything left un-accessed for 6months is abandoned, and fair game, and doesn't even require a warrant.
Re:How big is the market? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still pretty solid numbers though, certainly nothing to be sniffed at. While overall it may be a small percentage of total laptop tales for a handful of individual models it's rather good. The year-on-year growth rate is also very strong.