Chromebook usage ‘too small to measure’

Chromebooks would appear not to be the post-PC solution the world was waiting for, if figures from net stats company NetMarketShare  are any indication: the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was found to be around 0.02 percent, a figure the company considers  …

Although Chromebooks have been on the market for almost two years, take-up was slow, ZDNet observing that Acer and Samsung combined sold fewer than 10,000 units in their first six months – in large part because they appeared to have forgotten the ‘low-cost’ part of their job description. In particular, the $1,299 Pixel was competing with many full-fat notebooks.

Samsung’s $249 ARM-based Chromebook certainly makes a strong case for low-cost devices: we were impressed, and the machine at one point headed Amazon’s best-seller list (though as Amazon measures sales daily, a big promotional push on a particular day can achieve this). Perhaps more machines at this sort of price-point will put Chromebooks on the map, but the evidence suggests that they have an uphill climb to get there.

As an interesting aside, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call (via CNET) that he expects Windows 8 touchscreen notebooks to fall as low as $200. If he’s right, things could get very interesting indeed around this price-point, with tablets, Chromebooks and Win8 notebooks all competing head-to-head (ok, head-to-head-to-head).