here, by the way.
But Gartner sure has some news for the simple souls that believe that Chromebook sales are going to take a nosedive soon now that highly affordable Windows 8.1 PCs are here — the future is quite bright for these Chrome OS powered devices.
The firm expects 2014 to see out shipments of some 5.2 million Chromebooks, but come 2017, this figure is set to almost triple, to around the 14.2 million units mark.
This points to a healthy 79% increase this year compared to the year before. Then again, it is easy to grow at this pace when the initial figures are this low. Add to this the fact that most sales are still coming from the education sector, where these budget devices are replacing Apple iPads.
In terms of hardware vendors, Samsung, Acer, HP, Lenovo and Dell all have a slice of the pie.
The former two dominate the Chromebook market worldwide, with the Korean company laying claim to a noteworthy 65% of the market, while the Taiwanese one following suit with just over 21%.
Gartner believes that despite the popularity of these devices, hardware vendors are still keen on making Chromebooks even better, focusing on areas like faster connectivity, faster memory access and larger solid state drives.
The battle rages on and on.]]>
All Comments
Chromebook is certainly doing better than I thought it would. It is totally a shock to me, but Microsoft needs to react to this and take the Chromebook on as some serious competition.
I agree, @disqus_Dmj1jCaLXk:disqus. Microsoft needs to come up with a “Windows” Chromebook of their own (re: costs and simplicity). I don’t see the threat as bad in the home as I see it on schools, libraries, etc., but maybe the entire ecosystem will be shaken (given time).
Good point Rodney. It sounds like (from the 1st line of this post) that Bingbook could be the response Windows needs to make. I think will be on the horizon pretty soon.
I don’t know how good Chromebooks are. None of my friends own one nor do they ever mentioned it during chatting.
Remember, they said the same thing about windows phone in the US. grain of salt, that’s all, just a grain of salt.