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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

The report from Gartner, that this is based on, says that "Excluding Chromebooks, the worldwide PC market grew by a modest 3.3%". So PC sales did not decline, but Chromebooks have dropped off a cliff. Don't even wanna read their analysis when they bend their source like that.

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Quite the insult for PCs to be named in the same bracket as Chromebooks to be honest. Not that they are necessarily bad, but this is comparing a toothbrush to a dental laboratory.

"a modest 3.3%" after the strongest years ever in PC sales. The journalist is an idiot.

Might Chromebooks have, "dropped off a cliff", because so many people bought one over the past two years for their children to school from home that few people need a new one yet?

what even are chromebooks? i ve never seen one. i assume it s one of the obscure things 'only in america'

They're in Canada too. Mostly children use them. Sometimes hackers will install linux on them and use them as a super cheap (~$300) one-time-use laptop.

As a side note, you can't just easily replace ChromeOS with Linux like you'd do on most Windows laptops.

I want one, b/c UNIX and USB-C charging fits my personal needs very well. But the devices are either so cheap or badly equipped storage wise (Pixelbooks) that my 8 y/o Thinkpads outperform them. So I guess a MacBook will be my next buy in a few years to again have an ultra portable 10-year-proof device.

For me the best thing about Chromebooks are the tablet experience (either 2-in-one or detachable keyboards). Specifically, the fact that touch screen isn't implemented the same way a mouse is, but gestures work the way you expect (i.e., swiping on a browser window scrolls it instead of selecting text like a mouse would). Also, the browser is a desktop style browser instead of tablet / phone style. And once they included the ability to run Android and plain Linux apps, that made it much more useful. Still not a full PC / laptop replacement for all my use cases though, but a nice accessory.

Very cheap "laptops" running chrome os, mostly targeted towards schools. They can be centrally managed which is an attraction in addition to the price.

They may be using arm processors and tiny flash memory like a phone with a large display. Although there are higher end ones with specs similar to low/medium end windows notebooks.

I don't think they are exclusive to America, but hackernews isn't the target for low capability machines.

Lots of schools here in Sweden give them out to students. That being said, I don't think I've seen an adult spending their own money on one for themselves.

> i ve never seen one.

Really? At least the Walmart here stopped selling PC laptops and only sells chromebooks now.

Used mostly by schools, they are pretty close to a zero-admin laptop that generally only runs chrome. So students can see slides, do homework, access the web, access shared spreadsheets/documents, etc. It's all tied to your google account, and the school district can literally get by with zero admins. If a student drops one in a pool overnight, they can get a new laptop, login, and all their work is already there.

They are rather cheap, I bought my kid one for $180, like 7 years ago and it's still going. The intro instructions showed that if you poured a soda into the keyboard shake it out a few times and it should be fine. In highschool they handed my kid a laptop on the first day, quite a bit nicer than the 7 year old laptop, and of course quite familiar.

I've seen minimal market penetration outside of education. It is nice that they upstream patches for linux and to be called a chromebook they have to support a dev mode where you can install your own OS. So you can get a laptop, without paying the Microsoft tax.

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