The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit? • Hacker News Board

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#31

Post by andrewljohnson » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:54 PM UTC

azakai wrote: post #23

andrewljohnson wrote: post #14

The money quote: NPD’s numbers would have us believe Chromebook’s were nearly 50 times more popular (9.6% of the market vs. 0.2%) in a segment that grew 25% from last year. That’s rather remarkable as it would suggest sales increased perhaps sixtyfold. What else grew 60x this year, besides bitcoin and chromebooks?

The quote is skeptical of those numbers - "would have us believe" is the indicator of that. The entire article investigates whether the 60x number from NPD is plausible or not. The article's conclusion seems to be: perhaps in one segment of the market, but it isn't clear which segment, yet at the same time it is clear that sales are in fact rising to some extent. One measurement shows a 10x increase, much of it very…

Skeptical is not the right word. The following sentence after the quote says there is some evidence. I would call the tone measured and probing, but not skeptical. I admit it's splitting hairs.

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#32

Post by Crito » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:54 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #25

kumarm wrote: post #18

I Bought 2 Chrome books. 1 for my daughter. Only purpose she can use is Gmail (email and keep in touch with Aunt's and other relatives overseas). Occasionally she uses youtube and her school website. 1 for My Dad to read new papers online. Both of them love it and its the only computer they use. I am sure none of them show up in any stats. Edit: I must add Why I bought Chromebooks for both of them. Their uses cases:…

In the first situation, why a Chromebook instead of, say, a tablet? Or an iPod Touch, even? Children don't tend to get the same sort of benefit from full "hard" keyboards that adults do, and there are devices cheaper than Chromebooks that can be similarly locked down.

> "Children don't tend to get the same sort of benefit from full "hard" keyboards that adults do"

How do you expect them to learn to, if you don't give them devices with keyboards? Sure, they could wait until that typing class in middle-school, but wouldn't it be better to have them pick it up themselves, much earlier?

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#33

Post by shawndumas » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:55 PM UTC

okay bringing out the anecdotal stories.

firstly, my son used a chromebook and ssh'ed into cloud nine in order to do most of his learning of JavaScript and web development.

secondly, my wife has been using the chromebook the last year to do all of her homeschooling planning, finances, correspondence, and web browsing.

tertiarily, my father who spent the week with us over the holidays, used my wife's chromebook to great effect and is planning on buying one as soon as he gets back.

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#34

Post by dublinben » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:56 PM UTC

andrewljohnson wrote: post #14

The money quote: NPD’s numbers would have us believe Chromebook’s were nearly 50 times more popular (9.6% of the market vs. 0.2%) in a segment that grew 25% from last year. That’s rather remarkable as it would suggest sales increased perhaps sixtyfold. What else grew 60x this year, besides bitcoin and chromebooks?

Snapchat? Smart watches?

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#35

Post by acheron » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:57 PM UTC

bdfh42 wrote: post #2

A hit or not - but I just ordered one. I stopped carrying a Windows laptop around early in 2013 when I switched to a Nexus 10 for everyday use. Now I want to show other people that there are alternatives even within the familiar laptop form factor. Plus I want to demonstrate to customers that I can deliver a fully functional application without Windows.

It's funny, I would have agreed with you not all that long ago, but nowadays I'm much more concerned about avoiding Google than I am about avoiding Windows.

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#36

Post by Crito » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:58 PM UTC

andrewljohnson wrote: post #14

The money quote: NPD’s numbers would have us believe Chromebook’s were nearly 50 times more popular (9.6% of the market vs. 0.2%) in a segment that grew 25% from last year. That’s rather remarkable as it would suggest sales increased perhaps sixtyfold. What else grew 60x this year, besides bitcoin and chromebooks?

I'm sure many things, though mainly in small volume. ;)

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#37

Post by eli » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 9:01 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #28

corresation wrote: post #7

While this is a rehash of exactly the pattern we saw as Android grew ("Shipments not sales. Haven't seen one in a coffee shop. No one in my family. Some web stat source says..."), with the same players regurgitating their old hits, I do wonder why people trust StatCounter so much? StatCounter relies upon subject sites adding a bit of code that reports back to StatCounter, giving them their metrics. Curious, I inspect…

> Haven't seen one in a coffee shop. No one in my family. Some web stat source says..."), with the same players regurgitating their old hits, I do wonder why people trust StatCounter so much? And what has the actual result been over time? Are we looking for confirmation anecdotes in the wrong places? It seems to me that many of those early stats turned out to be true. For example, Android devices dominates the global…

Not disagreeing with you, but it's interesting that iPhone still dominates Android in metrics that measure actual use (go check android vs iphone in your web logs, for example).

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#38

Post by plg » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 9:02 PM UTC

thirdsight wrote: post #29

Osiris wrote: post #16

My daughter is using my CR-48 beta Chromebook. She watches Youtube videos, uses Wikipedia, writes stories in Google Docs, and plays Flash-based web games (which are admittedly quite slow on the CR-48's hardware). There's really not much she's missing out on. I don't have to worry about the drive crashing (docs are saved in Google Drive), her pressing a button she shouldn't, or downloading malware. It's a really great…

That's fine until your Internet connection is down for 4 days and she's due an assignment that needs to be emailed or printed. The device is a lemon then. At least with a normal Mac/PC you can plug a printer in it.

Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity. I wonder how many arguments there were 100 yrs ago about how device X or activity Y were useless because "what happens when the electricity goes down"?

Anyway it's a relevant argument today because as you say, we don't want the new "my dog ate my homework" to be "our internet went down and so I couldn't access my work on the cloud"

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#39

Post by pkulak » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

kumarm wrote: post #18

I Bought 2 Chrome books. 1 for my daughter. Only purpose she can use is Gmail (email and keep in touch with Aunt's and other relatives overseas). Occasionally she uses youtube and her school website. 1 for My Dad to read new papers online. Both of them love it and its the only computer they use. I am sure none of them show up in any stats. Edit: I must add Why I bought Chromebooks for both of them. Their uses cases:…

I've been slowly replacing every machine that I'm responsible for supporting (family members who ask me which computer to buy, and to please set it up) with a ChromeOS computer. Usually it's just a case of buying the new laptop and logging them in. Last week I found a used Chromebox for my dad to replace his WinXP desktop. It went well, but I did get bitten. I didn't know he even had a printer, and since you can't plug a printer directly into ChromeOS, we had to buy a new, networked one (which does work amazingly well, btw). I also had to _write_ two Chrome Packaged Apps (fun learning experience, haha) to replace the WinXP camera import wizard he was using and his photo slideshow screensaver.

Despite all that, I'm still happy with the decision. It's a super simple machine that's fast as hell, updates without him even knowing, and is incredibly secure. And the dev APIs are getting reasonably complete pretty quickly, such that I was able to write a little app to import photos off a camera in just a couple days.

Re: The Curious Case Of The Chromebook: Is It Really A Hit?

#40

Post by deadhead » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

thirdsight wrote: post #29

Osiris wrote: post #16

My daughter is using my CR-48 beta Chromebook. She watches Youtube videos, uses Wikipedia, writes stories in Google Docs, and plays Flash-based web games (which are admittedly quite slow on the CR-48's hardware). There's really not much she's missing out on. I don't have to worry about the drive crashing (docs are saved in Google Drive), her pressing a button she shouldn't, or downloading malware. It's a really great…

That's fine until your Internet connection is down for 4 days and she's due an assignment that needs to be emailed or printed. The device is a lemon then. At least with a normal Mac/PC you can plug a printer in it.

Write the assignment using docs offline mode. Print it out or email it from school. Or from a friends house. Or from the countless places that have free internet these days.