
U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth - BvS
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/
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mpweiher
...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
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-
Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_2_541966)

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gkoberger
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
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.

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DonGateley
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
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
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.

------
roma1n
Great! Now, where are the mid-range chromebooks? With a decent display and
some additional processing power?

~~~
arianvanp
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...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/)

~~~
MAGZine
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
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.

------
Zigurd
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.

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chippy
Depends on definition of "notebook".

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

~~~
azakai
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?

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MBCook
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
Because the stat is unreliable.

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

~~~
olefoo
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
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.

