Chromebooks are top of the sales charts at Amazon.com.
Big spike in Chromebook sales in 2013. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) cloud platform is seeing huge sales growth, according to retailers and analysts. What does that mean for other laptop platforms? Not great news for Windows, but near-catastrophic news for MacBooks.
In IT Blogwatch, bloggers count the costs.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.
Gregg Keizer brings good news and bad:
Chromebooks had a very good year...and that's bad news for Microsoft. ... Amazon.com called out a pair of Chromebooks [as the] best-selling notebooks during the U.S. holiday season. ... Chromebooks' holiday success...was duplicated elsewhere during the year. ... By NPD's tallies, Chromebooks accounted for 21% of all U.S. commercial notebook sales...and 10% of all computers and tablets. Both shares were up massively from 2012....
In many ways, Chromebooks are the successors to "netbooks," [which] stormed into the market in 2007, peaked in 2009...then fell by the wayside...as tablets assumed their roles and full-fledged notebooks closed in on netbook prices. MORE
John Gruber grubs through some stats:
If these reports are right, we should soon see a corresponding surge in web traffic share for ChromeOS. ... Wikimedia’s stats...don’t count Chrome OS. ... NetMarketShare doesn’t count Chrome OS. ... Chitika hasn’t reported on Chrome OS since March....
StatCounter does break out Chrome OS separately [but] its share is so low that it gets filed under “Other” in the results they show on the website. [But] they did seem to see a spike in December, going from around 0.04 to 0.1 percent worldwide, and from 0.14 to 0.34 in the United States....
It’s possible that Chrome OS [will] eventually be a major platform, but...will take a few more quarters of strong sales for it to make a dent. MORE
But Preston Gralla has his own analysis:
Apple notebooks accounted for only 1.8%, compared to 2.6% the year previous. ... Chromebooks [are] taking a hefty chunk of the...market, but with 34.1%...Windows still has a healthy market share. The same can't be said of Mac notebooks. A mere 1.8% market share is vanishingly small, and likely will shrink even further....
So yes, it's true that Chromebooks are hurting the sales of Windows machines. But Macbooks are even being hurt worse. ... There will always be a percentage of the market willing to pay luxury prices for a luxury machine. But that percentage appears to be dwindling. MORE
Meanwhile, Steve Cheney sums up his unequivocal thoughts:
Anyone dismissing Chromebook is a lunatic. MORE
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