I’ve been a believer in Chromebooks for a long time. Now, everyone else is getting the religion.
NPD, a retail market analysis company, reports that sales of Chromebooks exploded from zilch in 2012 to more than 20% of the U.S. PC market in 2013. This helped push overall notebook PC growth up by 28.9%.
Meanwhile, Windows notebooks sales were as flat as a pancake, and Mac sales shrank by 7%. At the same time, overall PC sales declined in 2013 by a record 10.1%.
None of this has been lost on the OEMs. In 2012, only Acer and Samsung had seriously invested in Chromebooks. By the end of 2013, all the major OEMs were making them. Of the top five PC OEMS, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer and Asus are all onboard. Dell, the last holdout, announced its Chromebook in December 2013.