Chromebooks on Fire

What? There's certainly no lack of "daring". There have been a ton of people making arguments about how Chromebooks must be doing incredibly well, based on the Amazon top sellers list. Or some other tiny slice of the market. None of the articles, including this one, has made a good case for Chromebooks having any significant market share overall.

If they're really selling well, you'd expect either Google or some manufacturer to brag about the numbers. (In the early days of Android, senior Google leadership couldn't go for a month without coming up with new numbers on Android sales). If they're selling well and being actually used, you'd expect people to actually use them for web browsing. It's not like they can do anything else. But nobody is reporting a significant proportion of ChromeOS users. The most recent report I saw had desktop Linux as 10x more used than ChromeOS, and growing as fast in relative terms: http://chitika.com/insights/2014/chrome-os-long-term

For businesses, it is a cheap enough to be a "throw away" and I would rather manage a Terminal Server (RDS nowadays) or cloud apps than many individual laptops. Centralizing the support of laptops alone could save huge amounts of time and money.

For education, the normal alternative is MacBooks. But would it not be more financially responsible to the tax payers to buy Chromebooks instead? Again, they are throw away devices due to the price and it should be assumed students will damage the laptops they are give. Finally, centralized control and management yet again.

For individuals, I see almost no reason not to use a Chromebook. Yes, some people prefer legacy apps and need some beefy hardware to encode videos, but most users are the target market: web browsers who write a document once in a while.

Obviously, each of these circumstances proves more difficult if constant internet access is not possible. But given the world today this should only be an issue for a very small selection of buyers.

Anyway, my suspicion is that this (ongoing, very well-received refurb sale) is an echo: that large quantities of these were sold during the previous Xmas holiday period, with a significant percentage of gift-givers/-recipients being unaware of the core nature of the item (instead concluding from appearance that it is "a laptop PC" (with a low price)), and, when confronted with reality, deciding to return it.

Same price point, similar usage patterns. I wonder if it will be a similar outcome.

I replaced my wife's netbook with a $199 Acer Chromebook about six months ago, and it's simply a better experience. It does less, but it does less well. I'm still way happier with my MBP, but I know that I'm not the target audience.

May be but only there, because I travel across Europe on my consulting projects and never seen anyone using one.

Or perhaps they're not. If they were, you'd see a big rise in web browsing stats. Amazon doesn't sell all that many laptops, and there are relatively fewer models of Chromebooks.

Take the top 1000 best selling laptops on Amazon, total up the numbers as Chromebooks, Windows and Macs, and I seriously doubt Chromebooks would be selling better even on Amazon. Talk about cherry picking statistics and then say "no one dares to write about their rise". Actually no one with a reputation right dares to write such unresearched garbage.

The writer might as well declare Nexus phones as the best selling phones in the US because they are #1 on the Play Store. I was expecting better from Mossberg and Kara Swisher's Re/code and I am sorely disappointed about the misleading flamebait.