14 DAY TRIAL // Chromebooks are often called cheaply made notebooks with limited functionality, and some deem them useless unless there’s an Internet connection near-by.
Microsoft in particular has been poking fun at Chromebooks saying they are devices on which you can’t really do anything. After all, they lack Microsoft Office and other familiar apps that make your laptop worth having around.
The truth is somewhere in between. Chromebooks are actually designed to be cheap, inexpensive cloud-based computing devices for people relying on Internet-related activities and who frequently use Google services such as Search, Gmail, Drive and Google+.
So given the fact that most users aren’t really power users who need to rely on advanced computing machines, there’s a pretty healthy demand for these Chromebooks in online retail locations such as Amazon (which also lists them as top selling products).
Earlier this week, we told you ABI Research posted new interesting information about the quantities of shipped Chromebooks last year. The firm noted that 2.1 million Chromeboks were shipped worldwide in 2013, with the majority (89%) having been sold in North America.
Furthermore the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is expected to be situated at 28% up to 11 million in 2019.
Chromebooks are also being called a disruptive force of the market, but some people might still have doubts about adopting a Chromebook instead of a full-featured laptop. But the firm notes, customers are intrigued, nevertheless.
While Chromebooks can take on a Windows-based PC any time, it is also important to note that customers might have a range of tempting options from the tablet category, such as the iPad mini priced at $299 / €218 or the Nexus 7 tablet that sells for $249 / €182.
You keep hearing mobile is the future of everything, right? But sometimes you might find the mobile-optimized version of the apps you need isn’t really good enough.
Chromebooks are attracting the interests of educational users due to their ease of use, personalization capabilities, wireless networking, multimedia capabilities and management applications.
There are also other important benefits like in the security department. The underlying operating system on a Chromebooks is virus-resistant by design, so it needs no firewall as there’s no network-available attack surface.
Earlier I mentioned that Chromebooks are gaining quite a lot of traction in the Educational market and that’s because they offer important personalization options.
For example when a certain student logs into a Chromebook, any Chromebook for that matter, his personal apps are delivered immediately, so that means a Chromebook can be shared by multiple students, which in turn is cutting cost.
Most importantly, this week Intel unveiled the Braswell chip platform, which is a low-cost, low-power alternative to the 5th gen Core processor code-named Broadwell aimed to be implemented in Chromebooks.
Braswell SoCs are based on a 14-nanometer design and that supposedly means the chips will prove to be more efficient than 22nm Haswell and Bay Trail chps.
So future Chromebook offerings will consume less power, bring more performance and even come with a lower price-tag, not many will be able to resist their appeal.
And as Chromebook makes their way into more homes and people adapt to web-based computing, these devices could truly turn out to be a real danger for Microsoft, at any price-range.