On Wednesday, 3 June 2015 at 04:36:31 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
chromebooks weren't even really usable until the latter half of 2013/start of 2014 when Acer/HP/Dell/Toshiba/etc all got on board and it stopped being just Samsung making them. 2% is huge for less than 2 years. That was the chromebook revision that featured the ultra low power Haswell CPUs(2955U,) before that they were incredibly slow and suffered from general netbook issues.
So you think they're about to break out? I don't see it.
And they're not even comparable to an android /phone/. Compare them to tablet sales.
Why? Do phones not "do everything 98% of modern computer users do... check email, browse facebook, and use twitter?" Seems like phones have taken over those use cases these days. :)
There is a giant market for devices that don't catch viruses and have all kinds of registry settings, but Android and iOS have taken 99+% of that market. I was going to make the same point Paulo just made: just get an Android device and you can put a Chrome browser on there too. I don't see the point of limiting yourself to just the browser, even though that is what a significant fraction of people probably use most of the time.
ChromeOS strikes me as google trying to use their one hammer everywhere, even when there are no nails, ie they're built around the web so they made an OS out of it. But it's frankly kind of a dumb idea, I don't see it lasting.
They're working on a multi-window mode for Android, early versions of which have been found by those spelunking through the recent Android M preview. Once that's done, I suspect they'll start putting Android on laptops too and kill off Chrome OS.
