5 ms·

Chromebooks on Fire

35 points by msh 13y ago

VMG 13y ago
Deliberately misleading title?
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Deliberately misleading image? That isn't even a Chromebook!
- sciurus 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    I'm aware of that, however the literal meaning could easily have also applied here.
- cmelbye 13y ago
  Edited/inaccurate title. The actual title from the article is: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."
Rylinks 13y ago
I thought the article would be about a battery problem
- wfjackson 13y ago
  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-recall-chromebook-11-chargers-due-to-fire-hazards http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/entry/hp-and-google-re...
coreymgilmore 13y ago
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.
- lotharbot 13y ago
  My elementary school bought 30 iPads last year. For about the same price, they bought 85 chromebooks this year. We can check out iPads to one classroom, or chromebooks to an entire grade level. With similar capabilities, this seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, there are a lot more exceptions than you describe. Many end users need beefy hardware, not just to encode video, but to run games or to crunch data or to compile code. For people whose main use case is web browsers and documents, sure, chromebooks (or tablet-dock combos like the ASUS Transformer line) are a great fit.
- IBM 13y ago
  Chromebooks aren't just competing with laptops, they also have to compete with tablets. Consumers/education/business are much more likely to buy iPads over Chromebooks because of the much better software ecosystem. Most of Google's services have apps on iOS so I can't really think of why someone would choose a Chromebook over an iPad unless they were completely price sensitive (the cheapest iPad is $300, the HP Chromebook 11 is $280). I think the success of touchscreen smartphones shows that it's not going to be the hardware keyboard that drives people to it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
_zen 13y ago
Note to self, sensationalized media to ignore in the future: recode.net
jreed91 13y ago
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.
blacktulip 13y ago
I guess one day Google will give out Chromebooks for free in exchange for all the data going through them
cmelbye 13y ago
Title from the article: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."
wfjackson 13y ago
>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.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  Why are you speculating when numbers are available? http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-surge-in-2013-to-21-of-all-notebook-sales/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-sur...
  - wfjackson 13y ago
    Because the article you quote doesn't have any numbers beyond 21%. First, 21% does not mean "top selling". And the 21% does not include consumer sales, nor PCs sold by OEMs, such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, directly to businesses. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245212/Analysts_blast_crappy_Chromebooks_reporting_defend_platform_s_potential http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245212/Analysts_blas... Google knows the real numbers but doesn't want to reveal them. If they're the top selling laptops in the US why not? The article you quote is just shoddy reporting dressed up as numbers and it's sad to see people fall for it. The headline is just flat out wrong.
- j2kun 13y ago
  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.
shortformblog 13y ago
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.
programminggeek 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
jsnell 13y ago
> 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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
nraynaud 13y ago
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.
pjmlp 13y ago
> 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.
cagey 13y ago
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.

Chromebooks on Fire

35 points by msh 13y ago

VMG 13y ago

Deliberately misleading title?

thirsteh 13y ago
Deliberately misleading image? That isn't even a Chromebook!
sciurus 13y ago
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 13y ago
  I'm aware of that, however the literal meaning could easily have also applied here.
cmelbye 13y ago
Edited/inaccurate title. The actual title from the article is: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."

Rylinks 13y ago

I thought the article would be about a battery problem

wfjackson 13y ago
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-recall-chromebook-11-chargers-due-to-fire-hazards http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/entry/hp-and-google-re...

coreymgilmore 13y ago

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.

lotharbot 13y ago
My elementary school bought 30 iPads last year. For about the same price, they bought 85 chromebooks this year. We can check out iPads to one classroom, or chromebooks to an entire grade level. With similar capabilities, this seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, there are a lot more exceptions than you describe. Many end users need beefy hardware, not just to encode video, but to run games or to crunch data or to compile code. For people whose main use case is web browsers and documents, sure, chromebooks (or tablet-dock combos like the ASUS Transformer line) are a great fit.
IBM 13y ago
Chromebooks aren't just competing with laptops, they also have to compete with tablets. Consumers/education/business are much more likely to buy iPads over Chromebooks because of the much better software ecosystem. Most of Google's services have apps on iOS so I can't really think of why someone would choose a Chromebook over an iPad unless they were completely price sensitive (the cheapest iPad is $300, the HP Chromebook 11 is $280). I think the success of touchscreen smartphones shows that it's not going to be the hardware keyboard that drives people to it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

_zen 13y ago

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

jreed91 13y ago

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.

blacktulip 13y ago

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

cmelbye 13y ago

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

wfjackson 13y ago

>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.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Why are you speculating when numbers are available? http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-surge-in-2013-to-21-of-all-notebook-sales/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-sur...
- wfjackson 13y ago
  Because the article you quote doesn't have any numbers beyond 21%. First, 21% does not mean "top selling". And the 21% does not include consumer sales, nor PCs sold by OEMs, such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, directly to businesses. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245212/Analysts_blast_crappy_Chromebooks_reporting_defend_platform_s_potential http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245212/Analysts_blas... Google knows the real numbers but doesn't want to reveal them. If they're the top selling laptops in the US why not? The article you quote is just shoddy reporting dressed up as numbers and it's sad to see people fall for it. The headline is just flat out wrong.
j2kun 13y ago
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.

shortformblog 13y ago

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.

programminggeek 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

jsnell 13y ago

> 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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

nraynaud 13y ago

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.

pjmlp 13y ago

> 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.

cagey 13y ago

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.