Chromebooks destroy Apple in back to school sales
marketwatch.com
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In my district, Google has really gone all-out to get Docs integrated into the teacher's repertoire and support it as much as possible. Every teacher, administrator, and student has a permanent account maintained by one IT person at HQ.
The collaboration is the primary driver. gDocs is way ahead of iWork and even my youngest kids are now comfortable working in Documents and Slides (1st graders making slide presentations! The mind boggles).
Being able to log in from anywhere (school and home) is the secondary driver and, again, this is a place where Apple is too little and too late.
The iPads in our elementary school are being used less and less. It's all on Chromebooks now and, yeah, they're cheap/disposable and all the other things people are saying in this thread.
But the software is the killer.
We had a little grant to buy three ipads. We repurposed it to buy six chromebooks, and things are going very well.
It's really sweet, actually, with the managed chromebooks. The kiddos know what they're getting and we don't have so much of the "hey, do your homework before you play games" hassles.
There are a lot of schools sitting on PCs from the last decade that aren't doing much other than running educational programs written for WindowsXP.
gDocs at least lets schools repurpose those machines and make them usable with the current curriculum. And then you have a foot in the door when it comes to the next round of equipment purchases.
Yeah, there's iWork on browser now but again, too little too late.
It seems to be a lot more intuitive and creative for them (draw a text box here, drag-and-drop a picture there) than the traditional word processing model, which was taken from typewriters when you think about it. We're two generations past using those anymore.
At first glance my thoughts were "shit, we're raising a generation of kids that will communicate solely through awful Powerpoint presentations and clip art", but in reality they've just adapted the tool that works best for them.
Having said that, slide format really does seem like natural way to communicate many types of information. In fact, I see a general trend toward delivering things like survey results in the form of a slide deck even though the format isn't such that it's really designed to be presented in its raw form. This reflects attention spans and it's just increasingly difficult to get people to read 8 page papers.
So I'm not really against slide decks per se.
But what does happen a lot is that contents (information density, etc.) don't get tailored for the use and audience. A keynote at a conference and the full results from a detailed survey may both be delivered in slide form but they should have a look and feel that are a lot different.
I'll admit, I was proud of our district's IT department for making a smart recommendation.
You're right that persistent data stores are a boon for education and I hope you're right that the administration is actively integrating it
I really like the fact that gdocs also has a version control feature built in
It's my opinion that version control is an important concept for people to understand and grow comfortable with using
By having that one IT person at HQ, Google is also reducing the amount of money each school district spends on tech by eliminating / reducing sys admin and support staff.
Whether or not this is a good thing overall, I don't know. But public schools like to save money everywhere they can these days.
My business unit had gone Mac, we literally were faced with refreshing 3 year old devices with nearly identical devices. That's insanity. Our existing Macs were getting long in the tooth, getting pretty beat up and needed replacement.
We took a long hard look at our options, and decided that if Apple doesn't really care about Macs anymore, we can't either. We can't run our business waiting on some mysterious event to happen and sending staff to the mall at 5AM to pickup MacBooks when they finally refresh them.
So, we went with some of the newer, nicer HP laptops with Windows 10 and Linux. It was a hard choice, as we really liked the Apple platform. But we had to retain most of the Microsoft licensing (Core CAL, etc) for access to exchange, file infrastructure and it didn't really cost us more.
It pains me to say this, but Apple just can't execute.
My retina macbook 13" is three years old, still as snappy as I first got it, no issues at all. Everything still works completely fine and it feels solid. The battery still holds 90% of its original charge. That's why I'll get a macbook again, because if I hadn't I'd have gone through at least 2 Windows laptops between then and now. These are just built way better. Other examples of laptops that compete on build quality, weight, and size are just as expensive.
But I do agree that they need to pull a miracle to get the mac lineup out of the sorry state it is in right now. I guess they're good enough for most people, and looking around at my university library I'm sitting in right now I can see many people with new macbooks and macbook pros. The hard part is for Apple to do something _interesting_ without making it _worse_...
which one?
I think Apple's problem, though, is that Chromebooks are also good enough for most people, and cost a ton less.
Maybe when they switch the Macbook to ARM they'll be able to drop the price considerably?
I bought a new MBP a couple of months ago. I would have much preferred to wait until the line was refreshed, but my toddler poured milk into my mid-2012 MBP and I needed another laptop now. Given the choice between a $2k MBP that's a couple of years behind in specs and a $1k Windows machine that I'd have to spend hours installing Linux on and dealing with getting all the compatibility issues dealt with... it made sense to buy the MBP.
So I can write, do graphic design, and program on it, the main three things I bought it for, where the latter two would have been much more difficult with a Chromebook.
This is just supposed to be a backup computer, one I take with me to coffeeshops and when I travel, but it's doing an awesome job at it that I use it a lot more often than I expected.
Still, I suppose it's useful to get kids used to the idea of all their digital lives being owned by Google. Prepares them for their future adulthood.
Does Google Apps for Education mine anything?
However, after the kids finish the school, they won't have their education accounts and so they will open the free ones, because they are used to the Google ecosystem. You know, the first shot is for free.
I think that it's genius and at the same time frightening at just how well Google has done in the education market, especially how well they've done at getting children to equate the internet with all things Google. Kids (at least the ones at the daughter's school) have no idea what email is. They only know Gmail. They don't know that there is any other search engine besides Google. They don't know that there are any other office suites besides Google Docs. They go to Youtube for everything. Which is easy when Google searches for things will show you a Google property before anything else.
The kids are living in a totally Google world at school since the school district went Google. They barely know anything else. And Google loves it that way.
Only Google knows.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usa...
For one, Mac sales slowed this quarter because people are anticipating the new lineup. Why would I buy yesterday's computer for the same price as tomorrow's computer? Just wait until tomorrow and get something better for the same price.
Secondly, the Windows laptop market is full of garbage, especially at the low end. Plastic, overheating, underpowered, bloatware-laden garbage. The market was ripe for a disruption like the Chromebook.
Many colleges and universities have made the jump to Google services for email and storage. It makes sense to a lot of people to use a device that integrates with these services out of the box.
So if the Chromebook is gaining steam, it's not at the expense of Apple, it's at the expense of Windows.
Personally, over the past year or two I've found it increasingly easy to travel with just my Chromebook whereas I didn't and don't find travelling with just a tablet works very well.
Back to sanity. Clicking here and there and forwarding mails so others do the job is not working. Nor is "networking" which might work well on a tablet. The key is creation which still requires a decent keyboard.
https://medium.com/@shemag8/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fa...
but need to get stuff done. And having a tablet doesn't make you to a CxO either. You can be creative in tying things together where the rather limiting ui and interface capabilities of a tablet are sufficient or creative by creating, where you need a decent keyboard, screen size etc.
I think we should return more to the create part than the shim shiny pretending layer.
In general, Apple's products are way too complex to give to a young student. Parents are "afraid" of their kids messing with the computer or bricking it, so they constrain their use and don't allow kids to experiment. Gone are the days where you can open a computer, play with the hardware, create a game, or write your own device drivers. Parents have to play the role of "IT Support" for their students/children, and if they don't know how to fix it, the computer is useless or constrained to just a few simple scripted uses.
The Chromebook fixes this by making computers disposable. The operating system, being limited in functionality to begin with, can't easily be broken. And Chromebooks are cheap enough that if they get dropped, hacked, bricked or otherwise rendered useless, you throw it away and get a new one. Chromebook reduces and removes the need for parents to mess with hardware or operating system configuration options. It also removes the concern over account sharing, itunes purchases, warez, etc.
Not really. Give them a $30 Raspberry Pi. (OK. Plus monitor and keyboard.) Even better give them a kit with a bunch of sensors.
And they can play with it to their heart's content while the Chromebook still is working for their schoolwork.
"Mommy why doesn't my music work?"
"Oh sweety you need to go download the source for the audio drivers and recompile them after making a few changes so it works on the attached audio board. If that doesn't work then here's a few kernel tweaks you can try out".
The SIM Card is a phone line with its own phone number. Of course, you can't call it or receive calls, but its technically acting like a cellphone with Internet. So as a phone line, you are connecting to a cell tower. So I can assume that if you go out of country, like any phone, you can enable roaming and it will find towers close by and use those, but those data rates could probably get expensive. Although T-Mobile is trying to become a true power player in the game against AT&T and Verizon and has definitely started to offer some really great plans.
Read this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp -- looks like you can get on a plan that will cover you completely so you pay nothing. I know when my brother visited Canada and turned on his phone, he received a text message from T-Mobile that he could "continue making calls and texting without any worries about data rates."
If you aren't covered in a specific country, I'm pretty sure you can call up T-Mobile and see if they can offer you a temporary package deal for like a month or a "pay as you go" deal if needed.
Mainly just the lack of local development support for self learning and side projects was why I dropped it, but it's still my goto machine for holidays and throwing onto the sofa.
Winning sentences: >"Gartner, which does not count Chromebook sales with its PC numbers, recorded a more drastic 5.7% decline [in PC sales]...'While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth,' Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner said"
Is the analyst using a 5.7% decline for their "shipment growth" number? Also curious about use of "sales" vs "shipments"?
Marketing Watch now worse than Barron's for accuracy among Dow Jones publications.
Destroy is a fair term, as Mac/PCs are a mature market, and devices get refreshed on a regular cadence. Substantial downward shifts in shipments, particularly late in the year before the holidays, are indicative that back to school sales sucked and lots of inventory is still on the shelves.
Chromebook are in a growth phase. In the spring, my local Wal-Mart had zero Chromebooks. Now it has 3 models. Those three models represent more shipments plus finite shelf space permanently lost to cheapo PCs.
And it makes total sense for chromebooks to be destroying Apple this quarter!
But if one is going to write an article saying that happened then have data. There is no chromebook or iPad sales data in this article.
My comment was more a complaint about finance journalism and analyst panderings.
That said, given reasonable connectivity, Chromebooks are pretty much ideal for a lot of things. They're cheap, easy to keep up-to-date, and generally great for most things a student would want to do. Thin clients have been talked up for schools forever and Chromebooks are, in many respects, the first take on that to succeed broadly. IMO, they make a huge amount of sense for many students.
Personally, as I increasingly use online apps like Google Docs I increasingly find myself travelling with a Chromebook vs. a regular laptop.
But the number of people who need a "real computer" is smaller every day
EX: GFs mom has a terabyte of pictures scattershot across a Windows 7 HD. Creating a backup regimine is going to be a serious undertaking. All she uses the machine for is looking at pictures she took and Facebook. If she was using a Chromebook, none of this would be a problem. 1 folder, always backed up.
I do all my coding on a chromebook. I use the ChromeOS as my GUI, dropbox as my filesystem, and crouton to run the ubuntu terminal underneath it all.
Ditto. I can alt-tab and share clipboard between the ChromeOS environment where everything Just Works and the Crouton environment where I do my coding. Quite nice, especially considering that a Chromebook costs anywhere from 20-60% as much as an Apple laptop. I'm on a Pixel 2 (non-LS version), which replaced an MBA. Despite being one of the most expensive Chromebooks ever, it was still several hundred dollars cheaper than what it replaced - with a higher-resolution screen and better battery life.
With some of the newer Chromebooks that are out there, some slightly better and significantly cheaper than what I have now (the Acer Chromebook 14 for Work is a particular standout), a Mac starts to seem like the idiot's choice even for developers.
When my 2009 MBP died 6 months later, I realized that I never go anywhere with it anymore (iPad) so I replaced it with an ASUS Chromebox. I've tinkered with upgrading storage and DRAM for using Ubuntu/Crouton, but that hasn't prevented me from relying on my wife's iMac for many things.
One could equally argue, "More Honda civics were sold this quarter. Bad news for Lamborghini?"
You can't really say "it's obvious that would've happened, because Chromebooks are so much cheaper!"
Chromebooks also have a ton of weaknesses compared to a "real computer," so I don't think this progression was obvious to most. It could've very well been Microsoft the one to take the market from Apple.
Also, I don't think Apple are the Lamborghini of computers — more like the Cadillac: overpriced; ugly but no-one is willing to say it; favoured by the sort of people who think 'the Cadillac of X' still means anything.
The long-term view was that Apple equipment in schools translated to well trained customers when they hit the real world.
The chromebook is so cheap that people are abandoning functionality to buy them. Kids are coming home with them and parents are using them like bigger smartphones. It's an inferior device that's good enough for many use cases.
In car terms, it's not a Civic vs. Lamborghini. It's more like a 2-door loaded Accord vs. a BMW 300 series. The Honda costs 30-40% less and gets the job done. The BMW is a similar, arguably higher performance car, but the value is really derived from cachet/vanity.
As an alternative if you really need a laptop there is always an old T420/T430 Thinkpad running Linux. It's a beast of a system and can be had for under $200.
As it is i've been waiting for a new Macbook to drop as it's the one bit of Apple kit I still like. But if it's disappointing i'll simply buy a reasonable Chromebook and use the SSH extension to do work elsewhere, which with the browser covers 95% of what I do with a laptop.
Love the iPhone but we are otherwise ditching apple.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28...
It's a good read as there are state laws going into effect to curl data collection and strict rules about how collected data can be used.
Regardless of the reason, Chromebook sales are up.