
Chromebooks on Fire - msh
http://recode.net/2014/04/30/chromebooks-on-fire-the-coming-consumer-cloud-revolution/
======
jsnell
> 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](http://chitika.com/insights/2014/chrome-os-long-term)

~~~
kentonv
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...)

~~~
jsnell
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](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.

------
coreymgilmore
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.

~~~
Wilya
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.

~~~
j2kun
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.

~~~
pjmlp
When the network connection is available...

~~~
j2kun
That's true, but a lot of new Chromebooks these days ship with "lifetime" 3g
or 4g, right?

~~~
pjmlp
Still no coverage in many places outside big cities.

------
cagey
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.

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

------
programminggeek
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.

~~~
j2kun
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.

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

------
Rylinks
I thought the article would be about a battery problem

~~~
wfjackson
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...](http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/entry/hp-and-google-recall-
chromebook-11-chargers-due-to-fire-hazards)

------
VMG
Deliberately misleading title?

~~~
sciurus
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._

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

------
shortformblog
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.

------
jreed91
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.

------
pjmlp
> 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.

------
nraynaud
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.

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

------
wfjackson
>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.

~~~
j2kun
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.

~~~
wfjackson
Are you saying "Top selling laptops on Amazon"

is equivalent to

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

How is that a fair comparison?

~~~
j2kun
I'm not saying it's good, but if you think that's unfair, it's certainly worse
to take the top 1,000 on Amazon.

Any method I'd approve of has to compensate both for the frequency of
manufacturers making laptops that ship with each OS and the amount of time
various OS's have been on the market.

