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U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

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Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#21

Post by lnicks »

tristanz wrote: post #7
mpweiher wrote: post #4

...in "commercial markets". As far as I can tell, that does not include consumer and would make the headline extremely misleading. So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.

I have no idea if 21% is correct, but on Amazon Chromebooks are 4 of the 5 top selling laptops. Something is going on. http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...

How many Chromebook models does Amazon sell? How many Windows models? How much percentage of total laptops sold does Amazon sell?

Lumia 900 sales were topping Amazon too.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/

>Something is going on

Could be just some good weekend PR work. Certainly worked well with almost no one checking the real numbers.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#22

Post by gress »

olefoo wrote: post #19
gress wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it unreliable, and how is the margin of error so bad that these are a no-show?

Because web usage statistics are hard to get right, and hard to interpret even if you do a good job on data collection. To get a reliable sample of web traffic as a whole you'll need to recruit most of the larger websites (Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, etc.), and a sampling of second and third tier sites and then process the data taking into account that browsers lie and that all of your sites that you are sampling are…

That explains why there will be noise and some degree of inaccuracy, and that the process is not trivial.

It doesn't at all explain why in a large sample there would be powerful unexplained systematic error about ChromeOS usage in particular.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#23

Post by nerraga »

MAGZine wrote: post #18
arianvanp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the Pixel[0]. It has a great display but is horribly overpriced in my opinion [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pix...

Why is the pixel "horribly overpriced"? The hardware is better than a MBA, imo. If there were drivers for win 8, it would be my next notebook.

I think you'd be hard pressed to run Win8 on a 32Gb drive with 4Gb Ram (although, admittedly, my Surface Pro runs Win8 adequately on 4Gb so it's the tiny drive that will get you).

If you compare the base 1299(wifi) Pixel to a 1299MBA(13") they look about equal as far as I can see.

The Pixel gives you a higher resolution display (2560x1700 vs 1440x900) and a slight bump in processor speed (i5/1.8Ghz vs i5/1.3GHz). The MBA also has an intel HD Graphics 5000 vs the Pixel's HD 4000.

The drawback to the Pixel imo is that there is no 8GB ram option and it's stuck with a 32 GB drive (even if it is an SSD). Also, the MBA has a longer battery life (8h vs 5h) and USB3 ports instead of USB2.

It's actually the battery life that pushes me towards the MBA. I picked up an XPS13 "Sputnik" in an effort to move away from Apple hardware and was immediately disappointed with the battery life. The Pixel doesn't appear to be any stronger on this front.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#24

Post by DonGateley »

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever.

There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.

Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#25

Post by YokoZar »

DonGateley wrote: post #24

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever. There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will. Some day historians will only scratc…

Alternatively, computing power will get so cheap and easy to distribute that myriad small devices will be fetching saved data from the cloud and running the app locally with all the better latency that entails.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#26

Post by pokesmot »

mpweiher wrote: post #4

...in "commercial markets". As far as I can tell, that does not include consumer and would make the headline extremely misleading. So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.

>presumably without asking their employees.

Why even bothering inserting that comment? I'm constantly surprised at people across all walks of life (poly sci masters student, journalism professor, fellow MS employees) that find Chromebooks to be extremely useful and portable given their price. Offhanded comments like that make you look... well... presumptive.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#27

Post by Zigurd »

The success of Chromebooks should put a question mark over some of the newcomer mobile OSs. Chromebooks illustrate that the sweet spot for Web apps is a big screen, a keyboard, and a pointing device. That's partly because the Web was not designed for finger touch.

If your mobile OS relies on Web apps, you might want to think about adding Android compatibility, as Jolla has done even though Sailfish also runs Qt apps.

Re: U.S. Commercial Computing Device Sales Set to End 2013 with Double-Digit Growth

#28

Post by dredmorbius »

YokoZar wrote: post #25
DonGateley wrote: post #24

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever. There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will. Some day historians will only scratc…

Alternatively, computing power will get so cheap and easy to distribute that myriad small devices will be fetching saved data from the cloud and running the app locally with all the better latency that entails.

Much as I appreciate a fat (Linux) client, the challenge is less device cost than administration.

The Android + Cloud model gives you a highly uniform user client which access all the fiddly bits in the Cloud. Until there's an absolutely bulletproof way of providing those services at the individually-provisioned level, that's going to win out for the vast majority of the public.

I'm not saying that the services have to remain as centralized as they are presently -- with Google owning everything (though this provides certain efficiencies). A more federated model in which there are multiple app and/or service providers to choose from _could_ come into being, and the present surveillance environment might help such an environment emerge, but the efficiencies of size and scale (as well as the very thin margins of such services) make this a stretch.

I've been watching a number of projects, most notably FreedomBox, for some time. They're pretty much precisely what you've described: cheap, self-contained, self-provisioning systems based around Linux (usually Debian and its excellent provisioning system), but there's been little noise out of the projects and progress seems slow at best.

If I could run my own servers (on an existing high-speed and highly reliable connection) without much hassle, it really would be quite attractive.

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