7 ms·

Chromebooks destroy Apple in back to school sales

49 points by SQL2219 10y ago

mark-r 10y ago
If Apple were to come up with their own version of a stripped-down laptop that boots to a browser, would it be successful? They're certainly capable of it. Naturally it would be twice the price of a Chromebook, but it would be worlds apart in quality.
- sofaofthedamned 10y ago
  But Apple are hopeless at services, which is what the Chromebooks rely on entirely. Last time I looked I couldn't even listen to Apple Music in a browser. What year is this? As it is i've been waiting for a new Macbook to drop as it's the one bit of Apple kit I still like. But if it's disappointing i'll simply buy a reasonable Chromebook and use the SSH extension to do work elsewhere, which with the browser covers 95% of what I do with a laptop.
mattbgates 10y ago
I am a former Mac user and bought a Chromebook 2 years ago and never looked back. The Macbook had served its purpose for so long, and I had it since 2009, but no matter what I did, it was still running slow. Chromebooks were insanely faster. In the beginning, I enabled Developer Mode, installed Linux, and was relying heavily on a lot of the features that Linux had to offer, but Chromebooks pretty much have everything they need, in the form of extensions or websites that exist to perform a specific functionality, so there's a workaround for everyone. I got the T-Mobile-enabled one so I can travel anywhere with it. Love it and don't think I'll be switching to any other computer again anytime soon.
- gchokov 10y ago
  Yeah.. but it's not a MacBook.
- faitswulff 10y ago
  Does the T-Mobile plan include international data like their regular cellphone plans? If so, how well does it work abroad?
  - mattbgates 10y ago
    I've traveled out of state with it but never out of country. You buy the plan you want and insert the T-Mobile SIM card. I had a really good plan at $10 for 5 GB a month which was plenty, because even if I ran out afterwards, which I hardly ever did (T-Mobile doesn't count data for Netflix or Pandora anymore), but it would just slow down to 3G speeds, which was still fast enough to check email and read webpages. I think I upgraded to another plan for $25 a month for unlimited data, not that I personally upgraded, but someone in my family needed to upgrade which automatically upgraded my plan. The SIM Card is a phone line with its own phone number. Of course, you can't call it or receive calls, but its technically acting like a cellphone with Internet. So as a phone line, you are connecting to a cell tower. So I can assume that if you go out of country, like any phone, you can enable roaming and it will find towers close by and use those, but those data rates could probably get expensive. Although T-Mobile is trying to become a true power player in the game against AT&T and Verizon and has definitely started to offer some really great plans. Read this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp -- looks like you can get on a plan that will cover you completely so you pay nothing. I know when my brother visited Canada and turned on his phone, he received a text message from T-Mobile that he could "continue making calls and texting without any worries about data rates." If you aren't covered in a specific country, I'm pretty sure you can call up T-Mobile and see if they can offer you a temporary package deal for like a month or a "pay as you go" deal if needed.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  I just went the other way and replaced my Chromebook with a MBP - the Chromebook is perfect for the vast majority of computer based tasks and a good percentage of what I do outside of work can be accomplished on it. Mainly just the lack of local development support for self learning and side projects was why I dropped it, but it's still my goto machine for holidays and throwing onto the sofa.
  - BooneJS 10y ago
    Agreed. Chromebook does a few common things very well and at a good value.
- asyncrony 10y ago
  Are you using a cloud based IDE? I was kicking around the idea of getting one. My main concern was not being able to develop locally on the machine.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    In my experience, though interested in hearing from others, they're pretty limited in that regard. It's one of the factors in whether I take my Chromebook or my MBP on a trip. Audio editing (for podcasts) is another; I use my desktop for photo/video editing in any case.
ghaff 10y ago
Chromebooks are obviously best at being web browsers. You can start adding extensions and using remote servers for other tasks etc. but, in my experience, if you're trying to use it as a regular laptop a regular laptop is probably better. That said, given reasonable connectivity, Chromebooks are pretty much ideal for a lot of things. They're cheap, easy to keep up-to-date, and generally great for most things a student would want to do. Thin clients have been talked up for schools forever and Chromebooks are, in many respects, the first take on that to succeed broadly. IMO, they make a huge amount of sense for many students. Personally, as I increasingly use online apps like Google Docs I increasingly find myself travelling with a Chromebook vs. a regular laptop.
jamroom 10y ago
Of course they do - this is like Android phones "destroying" the iPhone when it comes to sales volume. For a very large percent of students the Chromebook will work just fine - no need to drop a grand on an entry level Macbook.
rickyc091 10y ago
This is a bit misleading... the reason Chromebook sales have gone up is because many middle / high schools are starting to provide free Chromebooks to all students.
- sathackr 10y ago
  How is it misleading? Regardless of the reason, Chromebook sales are up.
jbob2000 10y ago
I think this article is looking for a story where there isn't one. For one, Mac sales slowed this quarter because people are anticipating the new lineup. Why would I buy yesterday's computer for the same price as tomorrow's computer? Just wait until tomorrow and get something better for the same price. Secondly, the Windows laptop market is full of garbage, especially at the low end. Plastic, overheating, underpowered, bloatware-laden garbage. The market was ripe for a disruption like the Chromebook. Many colleges and universities have made the jump to Google services for email and storage. It makes sense to a lot of people to use a device that integrates with these services out of the box. So if the Chromebook is gaining steam, it's not at the expense of Apple, it's at the expense of Windows.
- ghaff 10y ago
  It's possibly also worth noting (although the article explicitly doesn't address it) that Chromebooks seem to be winning out over the idea of tablets in schools. Which, for the most part, is as it should be even given the availability of low cost mini tablets from at least Amazon. Chromebooks are a lot more versatile, in part as you observe because of the increasing ubiquity of online services. Personally, over the past year or two I've found it increasingly easy to travel with just my Chromebook whereas I didn't and don't find travelling with just a tablet works very well.
  - jhoechtl 10y ago
    > Personally, over the past year or two I've found it increasingly easy to travel with just my Chromebook whereas I didn't and don't find travelling with just a tablet works very well. Back to sanity. Clicking here and there and forwarding mails so others do the job is not working. Nor is "networking" which might work well on a tablet. The key is creation which still requires a decent keyboard.
    - wlesieutre 10y ago
      That all depends on what your job is, doesn't it?
cableshaft 10y ago
I almost got a Chromebook a while back, but ended up getting an HP Stream instead. Still got the benefits of a Windows environment and flash storage (with an SD card slot) while only costing $200. And I've been surprised with how much it can handle. I've got Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 working on it, as well as Visual Studio Code. And I can install and run interpreters on the machine, which you can't do on Chromebook without turning it installing Linux. And the battery lasts several hours, easy. So I can write, do graphic design, and program on it, the main three things I bought it for, where the latter two would have been much more difficult with a Chromebook. This is just supposed to be a backup computer, one I take with me to coffeeshops and when I travel, but it's doing an awesome job at it that I use it a lot more often than I expected.
- eliben 10y ago
  Yes, but these are kids... A windows machine will be virus and trojan-ridden within hours in their hands, and maintaining a fleet of Windows machines up to date is notoriously hard.
  - blub 10y ago
    And a Chromebook will be Google-ridden from hour zero. :) Still, I suppose it's useful to get kids used to the idea of all their digital lives being owned by Google. Prepares them for their future adulthood.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      Don't worry, nowadays Microsoft mines the windows systems just like Google mines their online services. It' pick you master scenario, not choose between freedom or fiefdom.
      - Grangar 10y ago
        Linux is the only (albeit unfeasible) choice left...
    - 10y ago
taftster 10y ago
Chromebooks are cheap and simple little machines that you can safely give to children. With the available options on the market, parents are not going to buy an expensive Apple laptop for their middle or high school students. Instead, they want to give them something that can be replaced, if needed, by simply repurchasing. In general, Apple's products are way too complex to give to a young student. Parents are "afraid" of their kids messing with the computer or bricking it, so they constrain their use and don't allow kids to experiment. Gone are the days where you can open a computer, play with the hardware, create a game, or write your own device drivers. Parents have to play the role of "IT Support" for their students/children, and if they don't know how to fix it, the computer is useless or constrained to just a few simple scripted uses. The Chromebook fixes this by making computers disposable. The operating system, being limited in functionality to begin with, can't easily be broken. And Chromebooks are cheap enough that if they get dropped, hacked, bricked or otherwise rendered useless, you throw it away and get a new one. Chromebook reduces and removes the need for parents to mess with hardware or operating system configuration options. It also removes the concern over account sharing, itunes purchases, warez, etc.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >Gone are the days where you can open a computer, play with the hardware, create a game, or write your own device drivers. Not really. Give them a $30 Raspberry Pi. (OK. Plus monitor and keyboard.) Even better give them a kit with a bunch of sensors. And they can play with it to their heart's content while the Chromebook still is working for their schoolwork.
  - whamlastxmas 10y ago
    I laughed out loud at this. "Mommy why doesn't my music work?" "Oh sweety you need to go download the source for the audio drivers and recompile them after making a few changes so it works on the attached audio board. If that doesn't work then here's a few kernel tweaks you can try out".
    - ghaff 10y ago
joezydeco 10y ago
The key is Google Docs. In my district, Google has really gone all-out to get Docs integrated into the teacher's repertoire and support it as much as possible. Every teacher, administrator, and student has a permanent account maintained by one IT person at HQ. The collaboration is the primary driver. gDocs is way ahead of iWork and even my youngest kids are now comfortable working in Documents and Slides (1st graders making slide presentations! The mind boggles). Being able to log in from anywhere (school and home) is the secondary driver and, again, this is a place where Apple is too little and too late. The iPads in our elementary school are being used less and less. It's all on Chromebooks now and, yeah, they're cheap/disposable and all the other things people are saying in this thread. But the software is the killer.
- OliverJones 10y ago
  This is exactly right. I volunteer in an after-school dropin center in a public housing project. Our big drama crises these days come when our kiddos can't remember their Google for Education (Google Docs) passwords. We had a little grant to buy three ipads. We repurposed it to buy six chromebooks, and things are going very well. It's really sweet, actually, with the managed chromebooks. The kiddos know what they're getting and we don't have so much of the "hey, do your homework before you play games" hassles.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    Repurposing is something I forgot to mention as well. There are a lot of schools sitting on PCs from the last decade that aren't doing much other than running educational programs written for WindowsXP. gDocs at least lets schools repurpose those machines and make them usable with the current curriculum. And then you have a foot in the door when it comes to the next round of equipment purchases. Yeah, there's iWork on browser now but again, too little too late.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  My school, a private semi-religious, school in Georgetwon taught presentations to 3rd graders, and I'm 31. While it seems crazy, it's not so much of a stretch to pull that back two years.
hellofunk 10y ago
How is this even newsworthy? Chromebooks on average sell for 1/5 the price of a Macbook, why are the two products even being compared? One could equally argue, "More Honda civics were sold this quarter. Bad news for Lamborghini?"
- mtgx 10y ago
  It's newsworthy in the "Google is taking the education market away from Apple" sense. You can't really say "it's obvious that would've happened, because Chromebooks are so much cheaper!" Chromebooks also have a ton of weaknesses compared to a "real computer," so I don't think this progression was obvious to most. It could've very well been Microsoft the one to take the market from Apple.
- wtbob 10y ago
  It's newsworthy because Apple have owned the education market for so long, since the days of the Apple II. Also, I don't think Apple are the Lamborghini of computers — more like the Cadillac: overpriced; ugly but no-one is willing to say it; favoured by the sort of people who think 'the Cadillac of X' still means anything.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Did they have any meaningful education market share after the Apple II, but before the iPad? Before various "iPad in schools" projects I've never seen or heard about Apple in education...
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Apple had a big push with Macs early on. At least at the university level in the US.
    - joezydeco 10y ago
      Apple has had a long history of being involved in education, with actual support at the district level as well as hefty discounts for schools and college students as well. My university had an Apple section in the bookstore with an attractive pricing list (well, as attractive as a $2,400 Mac could be in the 1980s) The long-term view was that Apple equipment in schools translated to well trained customers when they hit the real world.
robinduckett 10y ago
My kid's class has maybe 20 chromebooks and 5 ipads. It's about price.
- BooneJS 10y ago
  My 5th grade daughter thinks iPads are for movies and games and her Chromebook is for homework.
qwrusz 10y ago
Bit of a click-bait headline. Article lacks data. e.g. Apple #'s don't appear to include iPads sales which do compete with chromebooks. Apple is likely shipping fewer macs, but "destroy" feels like an expensive word choice. Winning sentences: >"Gartner, which does not count Chromebook sales with its PC numbers, recorded a more drastic 5.7% decline [in PC sales]...'While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth,' Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner said" Is the analyst using a 5.7% decline for their "shipment growth" number? Also curious about use of "sales" vs "shipments"? Marketing Watch now worse than Barron's for accuracy among Dow Jones publications.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Sales data is hard to get for PCs in a timely manner, as most of the computers are sold through intermediaries. So the HP all-in-one desktop sitting on a shelf at Best Buy is "shipped" not sold. Destroy is a fair term, as Mac/PCs are a mature market, and devices get refreshed on a regular cadence. Substantial downward shifts in shipments, particularly late in the year before the holidays, are indicative that back to school sales sucked and lots of inventory is still on the shelves. Chromebook are in a growth phase. In the spring, my local Wal-Mart had zero Chromebooks. Now it has 3 models. Those three models represent more shipments plus finite shelf space permanently lost to cheapo PCs.
  - qwrusz 10y ago
    I agree on the chromebooks are at a different point in the product cycle vs macs. (I am also writing this from a PC). And it makes total sense for chromebooks to be destroying Apple this quarter! But if one is going to write an article saying that happened then have data. There is no chromebook or iPad sales data in this article. My comment was more a complaint about finance journalism and analyst panderings.
ebbv 10y ago
Who would expect anything else? They cost less than half of even a MacBook Air which is in need of a hardware refresh even more than the rest of Apple's notebook lineup.
Spooky23 10y ago
You need to be pretty dumb to buy a Mac now. They're clearly the company's red-headed stepchild. WTF would I buy a 4 year old computer at premium price? My business unit had gone Mac, we literally were faced with refreshing 3 year old devices with nearly identical devices. That's insanity. Our existing Macs were getting long in the tooth, getting pretty beat up and needed replacement. We took a long hard look at our options, and decided that if Apple doesn't really care about Macs anymore, we can't either. We can't run our business waiting on some mysterious event to happen and sending staff to the mall at 5AM to pickup MacBooks when they finally refresh them. So, we went with some of the newer, nicer HP laptops with Windows 10 and Linux. It was a hard choice, as we really liked the Apple platform. But we had to retain most of the Microsoft licensing (Core CAL, etc) for access to exchange, file infrastructure and it didn't really cost us more. It pains me to say this, but Apple just can't execute.
- joeberon 10y ago
  >You need to be pretty dumb to buy a Mac now. My retina macbook 13" is three years old, still as snappy as I first got it, no issues at all. Everything still works completely fine and it feels solid. The battery still holds 90% of its original charge. That's why I'll get a macbook again, because if I hadn't I'd have gone through at least 2 Windows laptops between then and now. These are just built way better. Other examples of laptops that compete on build quality, weight, and size are just as expensive. But I do agree that they need to pull a miracle to get the mac lineup out of the sorry state it is in right now. I guess they're good enough for most people, and looking around at my university library I'm sitting in right now I can see many people with new macbooks and macbook pros. The hard part is for Apple to do something _interesting_ without making it _worse_...
  - LyndsySimon 10y ago
    I recently picked up a very inexpensive Windows 10 convertible laptop, and have been VERY impressed with it. IMO in the future the Microsoft Surface Pro line is going to have a nice little niche, and I hope Apple jumps on it before Microsoft completely owns it.
Eridrus 10y ago
Despite Chromebooks not being real computers IMO, I'm heartened by the fact that these computers are cheap enough to provide access to students who could otherwise not afford anything, and now that we have even complex software such as IDEs and image editing software available through a web browser, hopefully the limitations of these won't even be real constraints for even advanced users.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Apart from getting rich districts and private schools to shell out for iPads, does Apple even have an actual K-12 story anymore? It seems like we've come a long way from the labs full of Apple IIs running The Oregon Trail and Math Blaster.
- bulldawgj 10y ago
  1. my mom was teaching computer in one of those labs, I got to spend every day after school ruling Oregon Trail and Paperboy on an Apple IIe. 2. Apple is providing free products to underserved schools, but not enough to make a difference IMO. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-stays-in-school-with-coding-curriculum-and-a-revamped-iwork/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-stays-in-school-with... https://9to5mac.com/2015/08/23/tim-cook-apple-education-gma-interview/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/08/23/tim-cook-apple-education-gma-...
porps 10y ago
In other news, Macbooks destroy Chromebooks in being real computers.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Correct But the number of people who need a "real computer" is smaller every day
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    I'd argue that you're correct and that the contrapositive is more true - the number of people who SHOULDN'T have a real computer is growing rapidly. EX: GFs mom has a terabyte of pictures scattershot across a Windows 7 HD. Creating a backup regimine is going to be a serious undertaking. All she uses the machine for is looking at pictures she took and Facebook. If she was using a Chromebook, none of this would be a problem. 1 folder, always backed up.
    - sofaofthedamned 10y ago
      Good point. I remember when tablets came along and immediately all the malware removal off crap laptops I had to do for friends and family simply disappeared. It's like it's all happening again with Chromebooks, just a little further up the chain.
- Tquila 10y ago
  In @nottheonion porps has been proven to be an apple fan-gay who doesn't even know how real computers can be real, when our eyes aren't real.
- jostmey 10y ago
  I own a chromebook and macbook. I do all my coding on a chromebook. I use the ChromeOS as my GUI, dropbox as my filesystem, and crouton to run the ubuntu terminal underneath it all.
  - notacoward 10y ago
BooneJS 10y ago
We "splurged" and bought our kids a 4 GB Celeron Chromebook (as opposed to 2 GB + ARM) last year. They have user profiles for their school account and a personal account. I don't have to worry about random things showing up in /Applications. So many nice things about a box that does a few things really well that's hard to screw up. When my 2009 MBP died 6 months later, I realized that I never go anywhere with it anymore (iPad) so I replaced it with an ASUS Chromebox. I've tinkered with upgrading storage and DRAM for using Ubuntu/Crouton, but that hasn't prevented me from relying on my wife's iMac for many things.
jostmey 10y ago
We own both a macbook ($1000 >) and a chromebook ($180). The macbook is bloated with software, popups keep sliding down the right side, and it occasionally freezes. The chromebook "just works". Love the iPhone but we are otherwise ditching apple.
hourislate 10y ago
It's hard to compete with a nice refurbished chromebook at Newegg for a $126 as opposed to a $1200+ MBP. If it breaks, gets lost or stolen it's no big deal. I understand the MBP can do a lot more but for the average kid or college student a chromebook is enough. As an alternative if you really need a laptop there is always an old T420/T430 Thinkpad running Linux. It's a beast of a system and can be had for under $200.
dingo_bat 10y ago
So do chrome books have a terminal? Package manager? Can it run apps other than chrome (sublime text or vs code)?
- notacoward 10y ago
  Yes, there are terminal apps for ChromeOS. There's an app store - two if you're on a model that supports Android apps - instead of a package manager. More importantly, there's crouton. You can use that to get at the real Linux (well OK it's Ubuntu) that lies underneath ChromeOS, with all of the terminal apps and package managers and compilers and whatever you might want. Better still, you can run all of that in a ChromeOS window, with full clipboard integration etc. so you can copy and paste between them.
JohnTHaller 10y ago
The thing to keep in mind is that Chromebooks haven't even reached their final form. Android apps are being added actively to the top end models with touch screens and will be coming to others. Sure, some touch-based apps won't work but most apps will. Eventually, we'll have Chromebooks that are either convertible or detachable and they'll be both tablet and laptop for each use case.
initram 10y ago
Do people really not care about some large corporation tracking everything your children do for ears at a time? There's no way in hell I'd let my child use a Google notebook that's tied to all that tracking crap.
- kyrra 10y ago
  Google tracks a lot less with apps for Education. Though they were under some heat from the EFF for it back in December. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28/google-is-tracking-students-as-it-sells-more-products-to-schools-privacy-advocates-warn/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28... It's a good read as there are state laws going into effect to curl data collection and strict rules about how collected data can be used.

49 points by SQL2219 10y ago

If Apple were to come up with their own version of a stripped-down laptop that boots to a browser, would it be successful? They're certainly capable of it. Naturally it would be twice the price of a Chromebook, but it would be worlds apart in quality.

sofaofthedamned 10y ago
But Apple are hopeless at services, which is what the Chromebooks rely on entirely. Last time I looked I couldn't even listen to Apple Music in a browser. What year is this? As it is i've been waiting for a new Macbook to drop as it's the one bit of Apple kit I still like. But if it's disappointing i'll simply buy a reasonable Chromebook and use the SSH extension to do work elsewhere, which with the browser covers 95% of what I do with a laptop.

mattbgates 10y ago

I am a former Mac user and bought a Chromebook 2 years ago and never looked back. The Macbook had served its purpose for so long, and I had it since 2009, but no matter what I did, it was still running slow. Chromebooks were insanely faster. In the beginning, I enabled Developer Mode, installed Linux, and was relying heavily on a lot of the features that Linux had to offer, but Chromebooks pretty much have everything they need, in the form of extensions or websites that exist to perform a specific functionality, so there's a workaround for everyone. I got the T-Mobile-enabled one so I can travel anywhere with it. Love it and don't think I'll be switching to any other computer again anytime soon.

gchokov 10y ago
Yeah.. but it's not a MacBook.
faitswulff 10y ago
Does the T-Mobile plan include international data like their regular cellphone plans? If so, how well does it work abroad?
- mattbgates 10y ago
  I've traveled out of state with it but never out of country. You buy the plan you want and insert the T-Mobile SIM card. I had a really good plan at $10 for 5 GB a month which was plenty, because even if I ran out afterwards, which I hardly ever did (T-Mobile doesn't count data for Netflix or Pandora anymore), but it would just slow down to 3G speeds, which was still fast enough to check email and read webpages. I think I upgraded to another plan for $25 a month for unlimited data, not that I personally upgraded, but someone in my family needed to upgrade which automatically upgraded my plan. The SIM Card is a phone line with its own phone number. Of course, you can't call it or receive calls, but its technically acting like a cellphone with Internet. So as a phone line, you are connecting to a cell tower. So I can assume that if you go out of country, like any phone, you can enable roaming and it will find towers close by and use those, but those data rates could probably get expensive. Although T-Mobile is trying to become a true power player in the game against AT&T and Verizon and has definitely started to offer some really great plans. Read this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp -- looks like you can get on a plan that will cover you completely so you pay nothing. I know when my brother visited Canada and turned on his phone, he received a text message from T-Mobile that he could "continue making calls and texting without any worries about data rates." If you aren't covered in a specific country, I'm pretty sure you can call up T-Mobile and see if they can offer you a temporary package deal for like a month or a "pay as you go" deal if needed.
wastedhours 10y ago
I just went the other way and replaced my Chromebook with a MBP - the Chromebook is perfect for the vast majority of computer based tasks and a good percentage of what I do outside of work can be accomplished on it. Mainly just the lack of local development support for self learning and side projects was why I dropped it, but it's still my goto machine for holidays and throwing onto the sofa.
- BooneJS 10y ago
  Agreed. Chromebook does a few common things very well and at a good value.
asyncrony 10y ago
Are you using a cloud based IDE? I was kicking around the idea of getting one. My main concern was not being able to develop locally on the machine.
- ghaff 10y ago
  In my experience, though interested in hearing from others, they're pretty limited in that regard. It's one of the factors in whether I take my Chromebook or my MBP on a trip. Audio editing (for podcasts) is another; I use my desktop for photo/video editing in any case.

ghaff 10y ago

Chromebooks are obviously best at being web browsers. You can start adding extensions and using remote servers for other tasks etc. but, in my experience, if you're trying to use it as a regular laptop a regular laptop is probably better. That said, given reasonable connectivity, Chromebooks are pretty much ideal for a lot of things. They're cheap, easy to keep up-to-date, and generally great for most things a student would want to do. Thin clients have been talked up for schools forever and Chromebooks are, in many respects, the first take on that to succeed broadly. IMO, they make a huge amount of sense for many students. Personally, as I increasingly use online apps like Google Docs I increasingly find myself travelling with a Chromebook vs. a regular laptop.

jamroom 10y ago

Of course they do - this is like Android phones "destroying" the iPhone when it comes to sales volume. For a very large percent of students the Chromebook will work just fine - no need to drop a grand on an entry level Macbook.

rickyc091 10y ago

This is a bit misleading... the reason Chromebook sales have gone up is because many middle / high schools are starting to provide free Chromebooks to all students.

sathackr 10y ago
How is it misleading? Regardless of the reason, Chromebook sales are up.

jbob2000 10y ago

I think this article is looking for a story where there isn't one. For one, Mac sales slowed this quarter because people are anticipating the new lineup. Why would I buy yesterday's computer for the same price as tomorrow's computer? Just wait until tomorrow and get something better for the same price. Secondly, the Windows laptop market is full of garbage, especially at the low end. Plastic, overheating, underpowered, bloatware-laden garbage. The market was ripe for a disruption like the Chromebook. Many colleges and universities have made the jump to Google services for email and storage. It makes sense to a lot of people to use a device that integrates with these services out of the box. So if the Chromebook is gaining steam, it's not at the expense of Apple, it's at the expense of Windows.

ghaff 10y ago
It's possibly also worth noting (although the article explicitly doesn't address it) that Chromebooks seem to be winning out over the idea of tablets in schools. Which, for the most part, is as it should be even given the availability of low cost mini tablets from at least Amazon. Chromebooks are a lot more versatile, in part as you observe because of the increasing ubiquity of online services. Personally, over the past year or two I've found it increasingly easy to travel with just my Chromebook whereas I didn't and don't find travelling with just a tablet works very well.
- jhoechtl 10y ago
  > Personally, over the past year or two I've found it increasingly easy to travel with just my Chromebook whereas I didn't and don't find travelling with just a tablet works very well. Back to sanity. Clicking here and there and forwarding mails so others do the job is not working. Nor is "networking" which might work well on a tablet. The key is creation which still requires a decent keyboard.
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    That all depends on what your job is, doesn't it?

cableshaft 10y ago

I almost got a Chromebook a while back, but ended up getting an HP Stream instead. Still got the benefits of a Windows environment and flash storage (with an SD card slot) while only costing $200. And I've been surprised with how much it can handle. I've got Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 working on it, as well as Visual Studio Code. And I can install and run interpreters on the machine, which you can't do on Chromebook without turning it installing Linux. And the battery lasts several hours, easy. So I can write, do graphic design, and program on it, the main three things I bought it for, where the latter two would have been much more difficult with a Chromebook. This is just supposed to be a backup computer, one I take with me to coffeeshops and when I travel, but it's doing an awesome job at it that I use it a lot more often than I expected.

eliben 10y ago
Yes, but these are kids... A windows machine will be virus and trojan-ridden within hours in their hands, and maintaining a fleet of Windows machines up to date is notoriously hard.
- blub 10y ago
  And a Chromebook will be Google-ridden from hour zero. :) Still, I suppose it's useful to get kids used to the idea of all their digital lives being owned by Google. Prepares them for their future adulthood.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Don't worry, nowadays Microsoft mines the windows systems just like Google mines their online services. It' pick you master scenario, not choose between freedom or fiefdom.
    - Grangar 10y ago
      Linux is the only (albeit unfeasible) choice left...
  - 10y ago

taftster 10y ago

Chromebooks are cheap and simple little machines that you can safely give to children. With the available options on the market, parents are not going to buy an expensive Apple laptop for their middle or high school students. Instead, they want to give them something that can be replaced, if needed, by simply repurchasing. In general, Apple's products are way too complex to give to a young student. Parents are "afraid" of their kids messing with the computer or bricking it, so they constrain their use and don't allow kids to experiment. Gone are the days where you can open a computer, play with the hardware, create a game, or write your own device drivers. Parents have to play the role of "IT Support" for their students/children, and if they don't know how to fix it, the computer is useless or constrained to just a few simple scripted uses. The Chromebook fixes this by making computers disposable. The operating system, being limited in functionality to begin with, can't easily be broken. And Chromebooks are cheap enough that if they get dropped, hacked, bricked or otherwise rendered useless, you throw it away and get a new one. Chromebook reduces and removes the need for parents to mess with hardware or operating system configuration options. It also removes the concern over account sharing, itunes purchases, warez, etc.

ghaff 10y ago
>Gone are the days where you can open a computer, play with the hardware, create a game, or write your own device drivers. Not really. Give them a $30 Raspberry Pi. (OK. Plus monitor and keyboard.) Even better give them a kit with a bunch of sensors. And they can play with it to their heart's content while the Chromebook still is working for their schoolwork.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  I laughed out loud at this. "Mommy why doesn't my music work?" "Oh sweety you need to go download the source for the audio drivers and recompile them after making a few changes so it works on the attached audio board. If that doesn't work then here's a few kernel tweaks you can try out".
  - ghaff 10y ago

joezydeco 10y ago

The key is Google Docs. In my district, Google has really gone all-out to get Docs integrated into the teacher's repertoire and support it as much as possible. Every teacher, administrator, and student has a permanent account maintained by one IT person at HQ. The collaboration is the primary driver. gDocs is way ahead of iWork and even my youngest kids are now comfortable working in Documents and Slides (1st graders making slide presentations! The mind boggles). Being able to log in from anywhere (school and home) is the secondary driver and, again, this is a place where Apple is too little and too late. The iPads in our elementary school are being used less and less. It's all on Chromebooks now and, yeah, they're cheap/disposable and all the other things people are saying in this thread. But the software is the killer.

OliverJones 10y ago
This is exactly right. I volunteer in an after-school dropin center in a public housing project. Our big drama crises these days come when our kiddos can't remember their Google for Education (Google Docs) passwords. We had a little grant to buy three ipads. We repurposed it to buy six chromebooks, and things are going very well. It's really sweet, actually, with the managed chromebooks. The kiddos know what they're getting and we don't have so much of the "hey, do your homework before you play games" hassles.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Repurposing is something I forgot to mention as well. There are a lot of schools sitting on PCs from the last decade that aren't doing much other than running educational programs written for WindowsXP. gDocs at least lets schools repurpose those machines and make them usable with the current curriculum. And then you have a foot in the door when it comes to the next round of equipment purchases. Yeah, there's iWork on browser now but again, too little too late.
3pt14159 10y ago
My school, a private semi-religious, school in Georgetwon taught presentations to 3rd graders, and I'm 31. While it seems crazy, it's not so much of a stretch to pull that back two years.

hellofunk 10y ago

How is this even newsworthy? Chromebooks on average sell for 1/5 the price of a Macbook, why are the two products even being compared? One could equally argue, "More Honda civics were sold this quarter. Bad news for Lamborghini?"

mtgx 10y ago
It's newsworthy in the "Google is taking the education market away from Apple" sense. You can't really say "it's obvious that would've happened, because Chromebooks are so much cheaper!" Chromebooks also have a ton of weaknesses compared to a "real computer," so I don't think this progression was obvious to most. It could've very well been Microsoft the one to take the market from Apple.
wtbob 10y ago
It's newsworthy because Apple have owned the education market for so long, since the days of the Apple II. Also, I don't think Apple are the Lamborghini of computers — more like the Cadillac: overpriced; ugly but no-one is willing to say it; favoured by the sort of people who think 'the Cadillac of X' still means anything.
- detaro 10y ago
  Did they have any meaningful education market share after the Apple II, but before the iPad? Before various "iPad in schools" projects I've never seen or heard about Apple in education...
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Apple had a big push with Macs early on. At least at the university level in the US.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    Apple has had a long history of being involved in education, with actual support at the district level as well as hefty discounts for schools and college students as well. My university had an Apple section in the bookstore with an attractive pricing list (well, as attractive as a $2,400 Mac could be in the 1980s) The long-term view was that Apple equipment in schools translated to well trained customers when they hit the real world.

robinduckett 10y ago

My kid's class has maybe 20 chromebooks and 5 ipads. It's about price.

BooneJS 10y ago
My 5th grade daughter thinks iPads are for movies and games and her Chromebook is for homework.

qwrusz 10y ago

Bit of a click-bait headline. Article lacks data. e.g. Apple #'s don't appear to include iPads sales which do compete with chromebooks. Apple is likely shipping fewer macs, but "destroy" feels like an expensive word choice. Winning sentences: >"Gartner, which does not count Chromebook sales with its PC numbers, recorded a more drastic 5.7% decline [in PC sales]...'While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth,' Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner said" Is the analyst using a 5.7% decline for their "shipment growth" number? Also curious about use of "sales" vs "shipments"? Marketing Watch now worse than Barron's for accuracy among Dow Jones publications.

Spooky23 10y ago
Sales data is hard to get for PCs in a timely manner, as most of the computers are sold through intermediaries. So the HP all-in-one desktop sitting on a shelf at Best Buy is "shipped" not sold. Destroy is a fair term, as Mac/PCs are a mature market, and devices get refreshed on a regular cadence. Substantial downward shifts in shipments, particularly late in the year before the holidays, are indicative that back to school sales sucked and lots of inventory is still on the shelves. Chromebook are in a growth phase. In the spring, my local Wal-Mart had zero Chromebooks. Now it has 3 models. Those three models represent more shipments plus finite shelf space permanently lost to cheapo PCs.
- qwrusz 10y ago
  I agree on the chromebooks are at a different point in the product cycle vs macs. (I am also writing this from a PC). And it makes total sense for chromebooks to be destroying Apple this quarter! But if one is going to write an article saying that happened then have data. There is no chromebook or iPad sales data in this article. My comment was more a complaint about finance journalism and analyst panderings.

ebbv 10y ago

Who would expect anything else? They cost less than half of even a MacBook Air which is in need of a hardware refresh even more than the rest of Apple's notebook lineup.

Spooky23 10y ago

You need to be pretty dumb to buy a Mac now. They're clearly the company's red-headed stepchild. WTF would I buy a 4 year old computer at premium price? My business unit had gone Mac, we literally were faced with refreshing 3 year old devices with nearly identical devices. That's insanity. Our existing Macs were getting long in the tooth, getting pretty beat up and needed replacement. We took a long hard look at our options, and decided that if Apple doesn't really care about Macs anymore, we can't either. We can't run our business waiting on some mysterious event to happen and sending staff to the mall at 5AM to pickup MacBooks when they finally refresh them. So, we went with some of the newer, nicer HP laptops with Windows 10 and Linux. It was a hard choice, as we really liked the Apple platform. But we had to retain most of the Microsoft licensing (Core CAL, etc) for access to exchange, file infrastructure and it didn't really cost us more. It pains me to say this, but Apple just can't execute.

joeberon 10y ago
>You need to be pretty dumb to buy a Mac now. My retina macbook 13" is three years old, still as snappy as I first got it, no issues at all. Everything still works completely fine and it feels solid. The battery still holds 90% of its original charge. That's why I'll get a macbook again, because if I hadn't I'd have gone through at least 2 Windows laptops between then and now. These are just built way better. Other examples of laptops that compete on build quality, weight, and size are just as expensive. But I do agree that they need to pull a miracle to get the mac lineup out of the sorry state it is in right now. I guess they're good enough for most people, and looking around at my university library I'm sitting in right now I can see many people with new macbooks and macbook pros. The hard part is for Apple to do something _interesting_ without making it _worse_...
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  I recently picked up a very inexpensive Windows 10 convertible laptop, and have been VERY impressed with it. IMO in the future the Microsoft Surface Pro line is going to have a nice little niche, and I hope Apple jumps on it before Microsoft completely owns it.

Eridrus 10y ago

Despite Chromebooks not being real computers IMO, I'm heartened by the fact that these computers are cheap enough to provide access to students who could otherwise not afford anything, and now that we have even complex software such as IDEs and image editing software available through a web browser, hopefully the limitations of these won't even be real constraints for even advanced users.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

Apart from getting rich districts and private schools to shell out for iPads, does Apple even have an actual K-12 story anymore? It seems like we've come a long way from the labs full of Apple IIs running The Oregon Trail and Math Blaster.

bulldawgj 10y ago
1. my mom was teaching computer in one of those labs, I got to spend every day after school ruling Oregon Trail and Paperboy on an Apple IIe. 2. Apple is providing free products to underserved schools, but not enough to make a difference IMO. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-stays-in-school-with-coding-curriculum-and-a-revamped-iwork/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-stays-in-school-with... https://9to5mac.com/2015/08/23/tim-cook-apple-education-gma-interview/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/08/23/tim-cook-apple-education-gma-...

porps 10y ago

In other news, Macbooks destroy Chromebooks in being real computers.

raverbashing 10y ago
Correct But the number of people who need a "real computer" is smaller every day
- JBReefer 10y ago
  I'd argue that you're correct and that the contrapositive is more true - the number of people who SHOULDN'T have a real computer is growing rapidly. EX: GFs mom has a terabyte of pictures scattershot across a Windows 7 HD. Creating a backup regimine is going to be a serious undertaking. All she uses the machine for is looking at pictures she took and Facebook. If she was using a Chromebook, none of this would be a problem. 1 folder, always backed up.
  - sofaofthedamned 10y ago
    Good point. I remember when tablets came along and immediately all the malware removal off crap laptops I had to do for friends and family simply disappeared. It's like it's all happening again with Chromebooks, just a little further up the chain.
Tquila 10y ago
In @nottheonion porps has been proven to be an apple fan-gay who doesn't even know how real computers can be real, when our eyes aren't real.
jostmey 10y ago
I own a chromebook and macbook. I do all my coding on a chromebook. I use the ChromeOS as my GUI, dropbox as my filesystem, and crouton to run the ubuntu terminal underneath it all.
- notacoward 10y ago

BooneJS 10y ago

We "splurged" and bought our kids a 4 GB Celeron Chromebook (as opposed to 2 GB + ARM) last year. They have user profiles for their school account and a personal account. I don't have to worry about random things showing up in /Applications. So many nice things about a box that does a few things really well that's hard to screw up. When my 2009 MBP died 6 months later, I realized that I never go anywhere with it anymore (iPad) so I replaced it with an ASUS Chromebox. I've tinkered with upgrading storage and DRAM for using Ubuntu/Crouton, but that hasn't prevented me from relying on my wife's iMac for many things.

jostmey 10y ago

We own both a macbook ($1000 >) and a chromebook ($180). The macbook is bloated with software, popups keep sliding down the right side, and it occasionally freezes. The chromebook "just works". Love the iPhone but we are otherwise ditching apple.

hourislate 10y ago

It's hard to compete with a nice refurbished chromebook at Newegg for a $126 as opposed to a $1200+ MBP. If it breaks, gets lost or stolen it's no big deal. I understand the MBP can do a lot more but for the average kid or college student a chromebook is enough. As an alternative if you really need a laptop there is always an old T420/T430 Thinkpad running Linux. It's a beast of a system and can be had for under $200.

dingo_bat 10y ago

So do chrome books have a terminal? Package manager? Can it run apps other than chrome (sublime text or vs code)?

notacoward 10y ago
Yes, there are terminal apps for ChromeOS. There's an app store - two if you're on a model that supports Android apps - instead of a package manager. More importantly, there's crouton. You can use that to get at the real Linux (well OK it's Ubuntu) that lies underneath ChromeOS, with all of the terminal apps and package managers and compilers and whatever you might want. Better still, you can run all of that in a ChromeOS window, with full clipboard integration etc. so you can copy and paste between them.

JohnTHaller 10y ago

The thing to keep in mind is that Chromebooks haven't even reached their final form. Android apps are being added actively to the top end models with touch screens and will be coming to others. Sure, some touch-based apps won't work but most apps will. Eventually, we'll have Chromebooks that are either convertible or detachable and they'll be both tablet and laptop for each use case.

initram 10y ago

Do people really not care about some large corporation tracking everything your children do for ears at a time? There's no way in hell I'd let my child use a Google notebook that's tied to all that tracking crap.

kyrra 10y ago
Google tracks a lot less with apps for Education. Though they were under some heat from the EFF for it back in December. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28/google-is-tracking-students-as-it-sells-more-products-to-schools-privacy-advocates-warn/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28... It's a good read as there are state laws going into effect to curl data collection and strict rules about how collected data can be used.