A couple of months ago, a report from Digitimes claimed that sales of Chromebooks had totaled just 500,000 units in the first 21 months since the first Chrome OS laptop went on sale. But has that situation changed? A new report from the NPD research firm suggests that sales of Chromebooks are doing better than expected.
In an interview with ZDNet, Stephen Baker, NPD"s Vice President of Industry Analysis for Consumer Technology, claims that Chromebooks that have prices below $300 have now claimed 20 to 25 percent of the US markets for laptops in that price region in the last eight month. In fact, Baker claims that sales of Chromebooks in general now make up five percent of the total PC market in the US.
Part of the reason for the upswing in sales is that Chromebooks in general have improved in terms of hardware. While the first generation of these laptops were hard to use without an Internet connection, the current versions can now handle more offline activities. Yet another reason is that Google has been pushing Chromebooks hard in terms of marketing and promotion, particularly with their "For Everyone" TV ads.
The good news for Microsoft? Baker says that NPD has seen sales growth for Windows 8 notebooks in that same sub-$300 price point as well. He stated, "There"s a trend towards aggressively priced PCs. These PCs are filling in the space left where the netbook used to be."
Source: ZDNet | Image via Google