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> 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
by 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 agoWhoa, 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 agoI 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.
- j2kun 13y agoPerhaps that's because the chart's axis is specifically for "Desktop web traffic"? It'd be a face-palm-worthy case of lying with statistics if true, but all the charts I can see from Chitika specify that they only use "desktop-based" web traffic. You can't help but wonder... And even then, the ease of installing linux on a Chromebook might confound some of these numbers.