Chromebooks on 'Massive Downturn' from Pandemic-fueled Heights (arstechnica.com) 57
Although PCs are still selling at a greater volume than before the COVID-19 pandemic, demand is starting to drop. In Q3 2021, shipments of laptops, desktops, and tablets dropped 2 percent compared to Q3 2020, according to numbers that researcher Canalys shared on Monday. Interest in Chromebooks dropped the most, with a reported decline as high as 36.9 percent. Demand for tablets also fell, showing a 15 percent year-on-year decline, according to Canalys. From a report: Both Canalys and the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker shared Q3 numbers for Chromebooks and tablets on Monday. Canalys said 5.8 million Chromebooks shipped globally during this time, while the IDC said the number was 6.5 million. Both pointed to a huge decline compared to Q3 2020. Canalys reported the drop at 36.9 percent, and IDC pegged it at 29.8 percent. Canalys said that Q3 Chromebook sales took a "major downturn" as the education markets in the US, Japan, and elsewhere became saturated. Demand lessened as government programs supporting remote learning went away, the research group said. After reaching a high of 18 percent market share since the start of 2020, Chromebooks reportedly represented just 9 percent of laptop shipments in Q3 2021.
saturated market and long-tail software issues (Score:4, Insightful)
There's still a ton of educational software that is specific to Windows, so at best Chromebooks can act as a remote client to a Windows session Somewhere Else. As said above, that slice of the market is likely full at this point, and connectivity issues through the pandemic have shown up the primary issue with using Chromebooks. Combine that with the chip shortages and it's no surprise the sales are down.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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What were their reactions?
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Chromebook market was squeezed by cheap Windows laptops above and large Android tablets with keyboard case below.
I don't think there's anything a Chromebook could do that wasn't covered by one or the other choice (at relatively similar prices).
Re: saturated market and long-tail software issues (Score:1)
There's less than before, but it does exist. Here's some that I know is currently in use that doesn't work on Chromebooks:
Universe Sandbox^2 and Minecraft: Education Edition for k-6, full versions of Photoshop and the rest of Adobe Creative Cloud, full versions of MS Office, Corel Painter, basically any "industry standard" software that our kids learn on.
Mind you, I'm all for teaching kids about transferable skills rather than specific tools, but removing the option to use such a large set of software is un
All growth must be infinite (Score:2)
There's a chip shortage (Score:2)
When there's a chip shortage there's no point wasting good hardware on a glorified terminal. The fabs are busy producing high value chips instead of whatever crap is in Chromebooks.
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Most of that crap was manufactured years ago or on a larger process node. The competition on the foundry line isn't there for these chips, which explains why their price has remained stable for the last two years.
Solid capacitors on the other hand, really hard to get right now and you can't build a laptop without them.
Trust in Google waining (Score:2)
I reckon Google's reputation has been soiled by killing off products and excessive ads. Or is that just me? :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I reckon Google's reputation has been soiled by killing off products and excessive ads. Or is that just me? :)
I think you are right on the money here.
Now that Chromebooks can run Linux, I thought a Chromebook could be a great alternative to a traditional laptop, to the point that I spent a lot of time researching them.
However, ultimately, I didn't buy a Chromebook because:
1. I have precisely zero confidence that the Linux you can run on the Chromebook is any good. It might be stuck on old hacked kernels and/or only have access to old/crappy repositories.
2. And, most important, because I don't trust Google to treat
But Macbook sales are up (Score:3)
Is that due to the 'stickiness of the Apple ecosystem,' the quality (hardware and software) of Macbooks, or just a 'fashion statement'? What's clear is that Chromebooks and Macbooks represent a very distinct choice for consumers in what they value.
Revenue here is definitely correlated with sales (graph of Mac revenue since 1997), it's not just "Macs are more expensive." https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.co... [wp.com]
Re: But Macbook sales are up (Score:3)
Windows server, which is the closest version of windows to MacOS or Linux is like $6000.
Easily one of the stupidest comments i've ever read on slashdot, and i've been here a long time.
MacOS is not a server OS, so no comparison to Windows Server.
Linux is a general purpose OS, which can be deployed in a server role without GUI.
Windows Server does not cost $6,000, windows desktop is about $100, Windows Server is about $500, with Windows Datacenter, which supports near-infinite windows VMs running underneath it on mega x86 hardware is about $5,000. You buy Datacenter Windows Server to run a dozen
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Essential ($501) has the 10-core limit, Standard ($1069) does not. And Apple M1 Max has 10 cores.
You might want to find a different hill to die on, your basic premise is wrong. This thread just isn't worth fighting over some petty details.
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That $6k Datacenter pricing is for 16 cores ... so this will cost more than you initially suggested if you want to continue with this baseless comparison of operating systems.
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no. try again smart guy. it's 10. [apple.com]. Maybe you were thinking GPUs instead of CPUs? or maybe you weren't thinking at all.
P.S. x64 Mac Pro is on its way out, it's going to be replaced in 2022. We don't know if the new one will be a higher clocked M1 10-core, a new 16-core, or a new NUMA/SMP variant of M1. (last option is unlikely)
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Agree with you 100% there. I think with compute and "AI" / inference being a such a big deal in the data center and that Apple is currently unable to fill this niche. It also gets to be a little iffy on how exactly you hook a Mac Pro into an InfiniBand or fiberchannel fabric for a cluster's SAN. (you could do this on the older generation Mac Pro, but the current one I believe has no viable option). Perhaps 2x10GBE is good enough for most "servers".
What's fun is there are some pretty high performance ARM Lin
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Home and Pro aren't using core-based licensing, and are not limited to 4 cores either (64 cores is the max on Win10 home, I not aware if that has changed for Win11). The main limitation of home, pro, enterprise, datacenter editions are things are supporting multiple sockets. Two 12-core chips is, as far as I know, not supported on the lowest spec versions of Windows.
Now if you want "server" versions of windows rather than workstation or consumer desktop/laptop, then things start getting expensive. Linux has
Re: But Macbook sales are up (Score:2)
You run production-level servers on MacBook Pros running on M1 Max chips? Under macOS? Seriously?
What point are you trying to make? MacBook Pros are datacenter hardware (running macOS)?
Re: But Macbook sales are up (Score:2)
No sane person would ever run Windows Datacenter on a MacBook Pro (ignoring the reality that Windows doesn't run on the M1 chip), and Datacenter is intended for running multiple OSE (operating system environments, AKA "VMs") on one host.
A person choosing to run windows server on a laptop would buy Standard edition, which covers up to two CPU sockets, and up to 8 cores per socket -at a cost of about $500-600.
All of this does not mean that Windows Server is required to compete functionally with macOS or linux
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MacOS is not a server OS
Yes it is.
Linux is a general purpose OS, which can be deployed in a server role without GUI.
How would you describe the difference between a Linux box as server and a Mac box? Seriously?
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Is that due to the 'stickiness of the Apple ecosystem,' the quality (hardware and software) of Macbooks, or just a 'fashion statement'? What's clear is that Chromebooks and Macbooks represent a very distinct choice for consumers in what they value.
Revenue here is definitely correlated with sales (graph of Mac revenue since 1997), it's not just "Macs are more expensive." https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.co... [wp.com]
Some relative "upgraded" my parents business from windows PCs to google devices . . . I was surprised that they actually bought Lenovo boxes. It became unusable as there was a gmail bug where printing left a bar on the side took up half of a page, and the boxes could be upgraded no more.
I was impressed when I (with a few headaches) swapped in a nice little ASUS device and my Dad was ready to go.
I was able to put in a 10yr old macbook pro after a battery & memory upgrade (added a SSD as well) and my M
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With the latest Mac OS release, Apple finally put my '14 Macbook Pro on their 'no longer supported' list. I'm using that machine now to enter this, it works fine. I'm also doing work on SketchUp on this machine, with good response. (Actually, it's running Mojave, because there are some 32 bat apps that I can't or won't upgrade to the 64 bit requirement.) Now my '14 got a new battery earlier this year, and I expect to use it for several more years at least as a travel machine. (This has the SD card slot
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Apple offered me $550 in trade-in for my '15 MB Pro (which I bought used.) against the new M1 16" model.
Re: But Macbook sales are up (Score:2)
You carefully avoided the fact that Apple is in the first year of a platform transition from Intel to their M1 CPU. There were likely a fair number of people that put off buying a new Apple MacBook until the new CPU was out.
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and then throw in how the M1 macbooks and mac minis are *cheaper* than their intel predecessors...
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You more carefully avoided
1. the graph I posted shows the last 25 years of sales, not just the last year of sales.
2. the new M1 14" and 16" machines, which are the real "MacBook Pros" are not part of Apple's FY 2021, which ended Sept 30. So the last year does include the initial M1 MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pros, but not the larger machines.
ChromeOS is good enough for everyday use (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people aren't running multi-hour renders in Resolve or compiling their own applications. They're sending messages, making documents and screwing around on social media. Chromebooks are damned near perfect for that. Even the crummy Celeron-based units don't really bog down from that kind of workload, at least not if they have 4GB RAM. ChromeOS may be spying on every single thing you do, but so does your phone. They don't get hot, they're cheap enough to take everywhere (I usually bring one when I travel, instead of my Thinkpad), and if they can't do all the real work, at least they can remote in to something that can.
As a commodity tool, these devices seem to come in every possible form factor, from 8" to 15" screens, touch or not, tablet, 2 in 1 or laptop. They don't really have the nuisance maintenance issues we deal with on desktops, and they're priced right for what they are. I absolutely advocate for ChromeOS for home computing devices. I wish their whole infrastructure wasn't controlled by Google, but they're really a great middle point between a phone and thick client system.
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I've been using a Lenovo Yoga Chromebook with a 4K screen as my daily driver for more than a year now. With a moderately powerful machine, ChromeOS is plenty responsive. If you don't want to sell your firstborn for a Mac and can live with something like 90% of the experience for 2/3rds the price, it's a very good option.
Of course web-based applications are the trend, even for coding work, but I was surprised by how useful it has been to have support for Android and Linux apps. Integration has gotten steadil
Chromebooks don't have a real niche... (Score:3)
When people needed something... anything to work at home during the pandemic, a Chromebook was better than nothing. However, with Chromebook prices going over $1000 for some models, people are realizing they are paying the same amount of cash for a glorified terminal as they would for a Windows laptop that can actually do stuff independent of the Internet. Yes, one can use development mode and run Linux, but that isn't what most users would want to do on a day to day basis, and Windows is a platform that pretty much everyone knows and find some type of support for.
Even on the enterprise side, Chromebooks are not great for remote work, even for logging into a VDI. Even Windows S is better in that regard.
Chromebooks do have a niche in schools, due to the price breaks, limited stuff students can do on them, and the 24/7 monitoring that can be done.
Niche wise, other than schools and people who really just want to browse the web and use no other applications, there isn't much functionality a Chomebook brings to the table. Windows laptops in the same price range are a lot more useful.
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Whoah there! Schools are the chromebook niche. Thus chomebooks were one of the first things to spike with Covid shutdowns. (I had to buy a couple more myself - not easy at the time).
We are going to see this story repeated in many, many industries over the year or two - the explosion in demand from Covid in particular market niches wanes. In some cases just as supply was finally starting to catch up with the increased temporary demand.
Hard to imagine now, but even the great "chip
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I agree with you, there will be a glut either after the spike is done, or people just do without.
But some things will likely change. The chip "shortage" woke up a lot of companies, especially car makers. I'm sure that a company like TSMC will get grants to ensure that they will be making new fabs, even if there is an insane amount of excess supply. It all depends if businesses bother changing their ways, or go back to expecting all their goodies to come from Taiwan or China, where on ship stuck in a cana
Re: Chromebooks don't have a real niche... (Score:2)
Hard to imagine now, but even the great "chips" shortage will end this way, a couple years from now. Whoever is last to get their shiny new $7BN fab online is likely to be stuck with a massive white elephant.
Doubtful, since the US Gov't is putting aside billions of dollars to subsidize new US Chip Fabs in their (stalled) multi-trillion dollar spending bills...
Getting a heavily-subsidized Chip Fab will help juice Big Chips bottom line.
Of course (Score:2)
Outside of education they suck and aren't really cheaper than a basic x86 laptop running Windows.
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It's possible to get new Chromebooks with 12 hour battery life and 1080p IPS screens for under $200. Entry level Windows notebooks start at around $300, and probably have lower screen resolutions, two hour batteries and the crippled S-mode version of Windows (which, yes, is trivial to fix, but only if you know what it is).
Chromebooks retain value longer. (Score:3)
With Chromebooks there is nothing to clutter up like with Windows. In fact, you have to be a bonafide computer expert with the explicit desire to push a Chromebook to its limits using with crouton, Linux for Chrombooks or similar exotic stuff. It is also quite likely that a regular user is genuinely happy with a Chromebook for a longer period of time. This is also why I by and large consider the whole Google / Android / ChromeOS Ecosphere to basically be the poor mans Apple/macOS/iOS Ecosphere.
In many areas Chromebooks are actually even less a hassle than Apple Laptops and simply the better option. Chromebooks are "open, login, works" even moreso than most Apple products. With Apple I pay obscene amounts of money and still am presented with lock-in adware, MS Windows style (Apple Music). On my current workmachine I had to actually install an open source system service app to prevent the keyboards play button from opening Apple Music and bugging me with ads everytime I pressed it. This on a 2500+ Euro MacBook Pro. No joke.
OTOH a bloated Windows installation is quite often the type-A reason for people to get a shiny new PC. Which is why classic hardware vendors love Windows. Especially when MS bloats Windows all by themselves for a new release. Buying a new Windows PC after writeoff is through has become tradition and standard fare in most corporations, hence the nice turnover enabled/enforced by MS, which the entire WinTel industry is so grateful for.
Most of my PCs are refurbished and run Linux. One of my powerhouse laptops is 8+ years old and runs current Ubuntu LTS without a hitch. Likewise my 5 year old ARM Chromebook still works exactly like on day one, if not even faster due to updates. ... I doubt that would be the case within the Windows world.
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With Apple I pay obscene amounts of money and still am presented with lock-in adware
Apple has no adware.
On my current workmachine I had to actually install an open source system service app to prevent the keyboards play button from opening Apple Music and bugging me with ads everytime I pressed it. This on a 2500+ Euro MacBook Pro. No joke.
You could have simple fixed that in the settings. As everyone who is using a Mac as "working machine" makes F1 - F12 into real function keys and uses the "fn" key to togg
Chromebook anecdote (Score:2)
I used a chrome book for a few years to access a non-profit's google suite-based infrastructire, but about a year ago it started telling me that my chromeOS (?) was end of life, and could not be upgraded...
That kinda sucked - the hardware/form factor was nice (old Acer), it can run Linux, I guess, but seems like a bother...
and water is wet... (Score:3)
"hey, everybody gets a chromebook in 2020"
"hey, we sold lots of chromebooks in 2020"
"hey, uh...keep using the same chromebook you have in 2021, as it is still good"
"hey, uh...nobody's buying chromebooks in 2021"
"media and wall street: nobody could have foreseen that..."
"/. : what the hell school did you idiots go to so I can make sure my kid doesn't go there?"
reminds me of Bob Cringley's discussion on IBM when they converted from mainframe rentals to mainframe sales. lots of money up front but then...well, everybody that wanted to buy their mainframe did and so the sales suddenly stopped. and IBM seemed totally unable to see that inevitability.
On a related note (Score:3)
Used (Score:1)
The demand won't last forever (Score:2)
People will start to run out of the glut of money they saved up during covid and will switch away from goods and services.
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Rather switch away from goods back to services.
Good values if you're on the fence (Score:2)
There are some really good values for Chromebooks right now if you're on the fence about getting one. I just grabbed a nicely spec'd Chromebook with a touchscreen for around $150 for an elderly parent to replace a dog--absolute dog--of a laptop that seemed to get slower and slower.