14 DAY TRIAL // Chromebooks are a love or hate kind of affair. Despite getting a lot of critique from Microsoft and Windows 8 supports, these inexpensive but decent devices have managed to create a powerful ecosystem for themselves.
Now, new numbers published by Taiwan-based research firm, TrendForce are showing us Chromebook shipments have reached 1.8 million in Q2 of 2014. And you might be surprised which brand vendor ended up on top of the Chromebook food chain.
For the first time, Acer has managed to surpass Samsung in terms of Chromebook shipments and is currently holding the top position as the largest Chrome OS laptop global seller.
In the first quarter of 2014, the two companies were competing head to head, each with approximately 900,000 units sold worldwide, but in Q2 Acer managed to perform better than the Korean tech giant. And we can expect this trend to continue in the upcoming months.
It makes sense that Acer won’t be letting this position slip through its fingers especially since Chromebooks are the only sector in which the company is actually successful.
We’re predicting Acer will be able to maintain the level of sales, notably because the company just rolled out the first Chrome OS lappy to take advantage of an Intel Core i3 Haswell processor.
Surely, the competition will follow suit soon and we already told you Dell is planning a similar model, but until its launch Acer will have time to sell its fair share of devices.
But that’s not all the company will be rolling out in the upcoming months. Acer also has a Chromebook running on the Bay Trail platform and NVIDIA Tegra K1 chip lined up for release.
Also, a Chromebook running an Intel Celeron 2957U processor has been spotted in a product brochure, so this model is also in the pipeline.
As for Samsung, its Chromebook 2 series hasn't been out long on the market, but so far we have no indication the Korean tech giant is working on the next-generation or plans to offer alternative models. It sure seems like Acer has the upper hand here, offering more diversity and better prices.
The Samsung Chromebook 2 is quite expensive coming with prices ranging between $320-$340 / €238-€253.
However, the Acer Chromebook with Intel Core i3 sells for a similar rate, with the base model selling for $350 / €257, but the price is validated by the bump in the processor department.
In the upcoming months, it will be interesting to see how Chromebook fair out once Microsoft starts unleashing the cheap Windows 8 laptops it has been promising.