5 ms·

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

39 points by BvS 13y ago

MBCook 13y 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 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks
- ffrryuu 13y ago
  Because the stat is unreliable.
  - gress 13y ago
    How is it unreliable, and how is the margin of error so bad that these are a no-show?
    - olefoo 13y ago
      Because web usage statistics are hard to get right, and hard to interpret even if you do a good job on data collection. To get a reliable sample of web traffic as a whole you'll need to recruit most of the larger websites (Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, etc.), and a sampling of second and third tier sites and then process the data taking into account that browsers lie and that all of your sites that you are sampling are going to be biased in one direction or another. Google for instance probably sees a higher share of chrome than similar sized sites. Add to which there is no standard way of distinguishing browsers other than by looking at the User-Agent string which is error prone and not guaranteed to be an accurate representation.
      - gress 13y ago
        That explains why there will be noise and some degree of inaccuracy, and that the process is not trivial. It doesn't at all explain why in a large sample there would be powerful unexplained systematic error about ChromeOS usage in particular.
  - alistairSH 13y 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?
    - chx 13y ago
      Or they do use them just not much because it's not the heavy users who buy them?
- fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  If anything Gruber points out that Chrome OS isn't being counted.
mpweiher 13y 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 13y 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-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_2_541966 http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
  - lnicks 13y ago
    How many Chromebook models does Amazon sell? How many Windows models? How much percentage of total laptops sold does Amazon sell? Lumia 900 sales were topping Amazon too. http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/ >Something is going on Could be just some good weekend PR work. Certainly worked well with almost no one checking the real numbers.
- azakai 13y 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.
- lnicks 13y ago
  This was discussed yesterday and the numbers do seem fishy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977640 This is HN and many of us run sites. Why don't we post ChromeOS stats? I'll start. For a completely nontech related site, for the last month, out of 117K visits, here is the breakdown for #7 to 10 Linux 782 Windows Phone 565 Series40 407 Chrome OS 224
- 13y ago
chippy 13y ago
Depends on definition of "notebook". I would assume it is different from laptop, netbook, ultabook and tablet.
- azakai 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
roma1n 13y ago
Great! Now, where are the mid-range chromebooks? With a decent display and some additional processing power?
- arianvanp 13y 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-pixel/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pix...
  - roma1n 13y ago
    Sure :) I was hoping for something between the Rolls and the Yugo
  - MAGZine 13y 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.
    - nerraga 13y ago
      I think you'd be hard pressed to run Win8 on a 32Gb drive with 4Gb Ram (although, admittedly, my Surface Pro runs Win8 adequately on 4Gb so it's the tiny drive that will get you). If you compare the base 1299(wifi) Pixel to a 1299MBA(13") they look about equal as far as I can see. The Pixel gives you a higher resolution display (2560x1700 vs 1440x900) and a slight bump in processor speed (i5/1.8Ghz vs i5/1.3GHz). The MBA also has an intel HD Graphics 5000 vs the Pixel's HD 4000. The drawback to the Pixel imo is that there is no 8GB ram option and it's stuck with a 32 GB drive (even if it is an SSD). Also, the MBA has a longer battery life (8h vs 5h) and USB3 ports instead of USB2. It's actually the battery life that pushes me towards the MBA. I picked up an XPS13 "Sputnik" in an effort to move away from Apple hardware and was immediately disappointed with the battery life. The Pixel doesn't appear to be any stronger on this front.
DonGateley 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

39 points by BvS 13y 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 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks

ffrryuu 13y ago
Because the stat is unreliable.
- gress 13y ago
  How is it unreliable, and how is the margin of error so bad that these are a no-show?
  - olefoo 13y ago
    Because web usage statistics are hard to get right, and hard to interpret even if you do a good job on data collection. To get a reliable sample of web traffic as a whole you'll need to recruit most of the larger websites (Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, etc.), and a sampling of second and third tier sites and then process the data taking into account that browsers lie and that all of your sites that you are sampling are going to be biased in one direction or another. Google for instance probably sees a higher share of chrome than similar sized sites. Add to which there is no standard way of distinguishing browsers other than by looking at the User-Agent string which is error prone and not guaranteed to be an accurate representation.
    - gress 13y ago
      That explains why there will be noise and some degree of inaccuracy, and that the process is not trivial. It doesn't at all explain why in a large sample there would be powerful unexplained systematic error about ChromeOS usage in particular.
- alistairSH 13y 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?
  - chx 13y ago
    Or they do use them just not much because it's not the heavy users who buy them?
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
If anything Gruber points out that Chrome OS isn't being counted.

mpweiher 13y 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 13y 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-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_2_541966 http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
- lnicks 13y ago
  How many Chromebook models does Amazon sell? How many Windows models? How much percentage of total laptops sold does Amazon sell? Lumia 900 sales were topping Amazon too. http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/ >Something is going on Could be just some good weekend PR work. Certainly worked well with almost no one checking the real numbers.
azakai 13y 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.
lnicks 13y ago
This was discussed yesterday and the numbers do seem fishy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977640 This is HN and many of us run sites. Why don't we post ChromeOS stats? I'll start. For a completely nontech related site, for the last month, out of 117K visits, here is the breakdown for #7 to 10 Linux 782 Windows Phone 565 Series40 407 Chrome OS 224
13y ago

chippy 13y ago

Depends on definition of "notebook". I would assume it is different from laptop, netbook, ultabook and tablet.

azakai 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

roma1n 13y ago

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

arianvanp 13y 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-pixel/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pix...
- roma1n 13y ago
  Sure :) I was hoping for something between the Rolls and the Yugo
- MAGZine 13y 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.
  - nerraga 13y ago
    I think you'd be hard pressed to run Win8 on a 32Gb drive with 4Gb Ram (although, admittedly, my Surface Pro runs Win8 adequately on 4Gb so it's the tiny drive that will get you). If you compare the base 1299(wifi) Pixel to a 1299MBA(13") they look about equal as far as I can see. The Pixel gives you a higher resolution display (2560x1700 vs 1440x900) and a slight bump in processor speed (i5/1.8Ghz vs i5/1.3GHz). The MBA also has an intel HD Graphics 5000 vs the Pixel's HD 4000. The drawback to the Pixel imo is that there is no 8GB ram option and it's stuck with a 32 GB drive (even if it is an SSD). Also, the MBA has a longer battery life (8h vs 5h) and USB3 ports instead of USB2. It's actually the battery life that pushes me towards the MBA. I picked up an XPS13 "Sputnik" in an effort to move away from Apple hardware and was immediately disappointed with the battery life. The Pixel doesn't appear to be any stronger on this front.

DonGateley 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.