We always hear from some of our readers when we cover Chromebook news, that no one uses a Chromebook. Well someone’s buying them. Because according to a report from the research group NDP, about 21% of all notebook sales are Chromebooks. The rise happened in 2013, where Google and their partners announced quite a few new Chromebooks. HP announced the Chromebook 11 and 14. Acer announced three variants of the C720. There’s one with 2GB of RAM, one with 4GB of RAM, and a touchscreen variant. Those are all under $300. Then there’s the Chromebook Pixel, which is by far my favorite Chromebook. But it is pretty pricey, at about $1500. Hopefully we’ll see more Chromebooks between the $300 and $1500 price range soon.
Last year, Chrome OS only made up 0.2% of the computer and tablet market share. This year it rose to 10%. This is different from the 21% we mentioned earlier. That was just in laptops or notebooks. The 10% market share here is among all computers and tablets. So a much bigger range of devices.
Chromebooks aren’t perfect for everyone, yet. When people ask me if they should get a Chromebook, I basically ask what they want to use this Chromebook for. If everything they want to do on the Chromebook can be done in Google Chrome, then it’s a great choice. Especially in the specs-price ratio. For those that travel to trade shows a lot like us, a Chromebook is an excellent choice, although it’s not that good for editing pictures and videos. However there are great web tools for that.
We’re expecting to see even more Chromebooks being announced in 2014. Including a few from ASUS, as well as more from HP, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer. We may even see another one from Samsung. As we are still waiting on a successor to the ARM Samsung Chromebook. I honestly, hope they put a Intel Haswell chip instead of an Exynos chip in their next Chromebook.
How many of you are sporting a Chromebook? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.