Chromebook market expected to grow to over 17 million units over the next several years

Chromebooks are quickly growing in popularity and with recent updates bringing a lot of new functionality to the table, we can only expect to see more and more on the market. In fact, over the next several years one report is estimating that we will see over 17 million Chromebooks out in the wild by 2023 (via Global Market Insights).

The same source estimated that we would see 5.3 million Chromebooks sold by 2014, so a jump to 17 million nearly 10 years later is likely a fairly conservative estimate. Looking at the market during 2016 we’ve already seen Chromebook sales overtake Apple’s Macbooks for the first time, shipping over 2 million units while Apple shipped a little over 1.7 million.

This rapid growth is thanks in part to the number of Chromebooks being sold in the education sector. In 2014 it was estimated that a massive 84% of the entire Chromebook industry was in North America, making up about 4.8 million units. In that market, the education sector took 60% of the demand with consumers taking another 38.6% and businesses taking another 1.1%.

Rising demand for personal computers in schools across various countries is projected to drive the industry demand for the product. Proliferating adoption of these systems owing to rising demand of cloud computing among businesses & consumer as well as among retail purchases made by customers for daily computing needs is likely to positively impact the industry growth.

As we move forward in Chrome OS’ future, we look to the full rollout of the Google Play Store on Chrome OS which will further enhance what the OS is capable of, especially in offline scenarios.