US PC shipments soar 73% in the first quarter as Apple falls from top spot

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DukenukemX

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HP took top spot in PC sales with 11 million units sold in total and an annual growth up an astonishing 122.6%. I wonder if that's the reason Apple decided to limit their new macOS Monterey Features from Intel Macs? "Other companies boasting big growth numbers include Samsung at 116% and Lenovo at 92.8%. Dell was up 29.2%, fairly modest compared with the rest of the group."

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/08/u...e-first-quarter-as-apple-falls-from-top-spot/
 
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Perhaps not surprisingly, low-cost Chromebooks were the most popular item as people looking to refresh their devices, especially for education purposes, turned to the lower end of the PC market, which likely had a negative impact on higher-priced Apple products, as well contributing to its drop from the top spot.


That’s where Samsung and other Chromebook vendors really shined. The firm reports that over the last year Chromebook sales shot up 548% with Samsung leading that growth with an astonishing 1,963% growth rate. Asus, HP and Lenovo all reported Chromebook sales rates up over 900%.
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Wow...
 
Nobu said:
Wow...
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They are also exceptionally popular in schools. Cheap, easy to lockdown, and easy to integrate with google apps.

All of our local school districts use google docs, drives, email hosting, Chromebooks, etc. Every student gets a Chromebook at the start of each year even if they have a home PC.

I imagine with Covid any schools that weren't doing something similar are now.
 
Kardonxt said:
They are also exceptionally popular in schools. Cheap, easy to lockdown, and easy to integrate with google apps.

All of our local school districts use google docs, drives, email hosting, Chromebooks, etc. Every student gets a Chromebook at the start of each year even if they have a home PC.

I imagine with Covid any schools that weren't doing something similar are now.
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It's still impressive. 50 -> 50000 sort of increase, and I know they were selling more than 50.

Edit: don't let me do maths in the morning... 50 -> 2000, but still pretty big jump. XD
 
It's almost certain the large spike in Chromebook, etc. sales are the direct results of schools preparing to have their students remote educated.

Funny how it took a pandemic to knock many school admins into that line of preparedness. Props to schools that already invested into such a thing prior to shit hitting the fan.

I'm sure if you look at other market statistics, such as sales of plexiglass, the numbers have soared there as well.
 
Nobu said:
It's still impressive. 50 -> 50000 sort of increase, and I know they were selling more than 50.
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It's definitely an impressive number. I just don't think it's going to be sustained growth.
 
Absalom said:
It's almost certain the large spike in Chromebook, etc. sales are the direct results of schools preparing to have their students remote educated.

Funny how it took a pandemic to knock many school admins into that line of preparedness. Props to schools that already invested into such a thing prior to shit hitting the fan.
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Less affluent school districts couldn't justify the cost prior to pandemic.
 
“That’s where Samsung and other Chromebook vendors really shined. The firm reports that over the last year Chromebook sales shot up 548% with Samsung leading that growth with an astonishing 1,963% growth rate. Asus, HP and Lenovo all reported Chromebook sales rates up over 900%.”

Low margin chrome books and they think this is sustainable? Doubt. Schools are going back live and they’ve bought the units they need for the foreseeable future.

Chromebooks are the new netbook.
 
auntjemima said:
I live in rural buttfuck Canada and even our mini school had Chromebooks well before the pandemic.
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My guess is land of Canucks probably funds public schools better than US counterparts. I know schools systems in some states have issues paying teachers salary above the poverty line.
 
Chromebooks are actually really nice for average users. I have a few just to play with cause they were cheap, for the price they do fine for general web browsing and cloud apps.

For me as a gamer and game developer, I could probably never use a Chromebook as a daily driver, but for many people that is all they need.
 
I mean...you don't need a macbook pro or samsung galaxy tab8 or whatever in grade school anyway.
 
I have purchased some 300 Chromebooks in the last 4 months. They are cheap, super easy to manage, faster to configure than they are to unpack, and there is almost nothing that can go wrong with them. We have them here all configured to wipe after every log out so students log in they do their stuff it gets saved to google drive blah blah blah they log out and it was like they never logged in. Makes maintenance on them basically nothing, they are by far the most cost-effective computing device I can bring in for general purpose work, for specialized tasks there are a number of VDI tools out there, NComputing, Citrix, and VMware being the most common which can get people access to the windows based software they need beyond what the Chromebooks can offer and again that just makes the distribution of those applications easier and cheaper. For education especially Chromebooks have been a blessing, and now that basically, every kid is using one daily I am not at all surprised that they are purchasing them on their own, hook them while they're young after all.
 
DukenukemX said:
HP took top spot in PC sales with 11 million units sold in total and an annual growth up an astonishing 122.6%. I wonder if that's the reason Apple decided to limit their new macOS Monterey Features from Intel Macs? "Other companies boasting big growth numbers include Samsung at 116% and Lenovo at 92.8%. Dell was up 29.2%, fairly modest compared with the rest of the group."

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/08/u...e-first-quarter-as-apple-falls-from-top-spot/
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Given that Apple still saw a 35% growth in shipments, that it outpaced Dell, and that macOS Monterey was likely in development for a year or more, I'm gonna have to say... no, this wasn't the reason Monterey requires Apple Silicon for a few nice-but-not-crucial features. Companies rarely make those kinds of strategic decisions based on one quarter's results, especially when they're still excellent results.

The boring likelihood for Apple's market share shift is that HP sells cheap computers (including Chromebooks), and that cheap computers are important for businesses and schools that need to deploy a whole lot of remote work equipment. Apple is a premium brand that appeals a lot to people buying work-from-home computers for themselves, but isn't about to sell a load of $999 MacBook Airs to a school that barely has an IT budget in the first place.

As it stands, it's rather telling that Apple is still in second place despite selling a narrower and significantly more expensive range of systems — especially when some of its customers are still waiting for more Macs with in-house silicon. Let's see what things are like in the next quarter or two before we start making definitive proclamations, shall we?
 
Nobu said:
I mean...you don't need a macbook pro or samsung galaxy tab8 or whatever in grade school anyway.
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Yes and no, I have kids in grade 4 classrooms rocking iPad pro's, macBook pro's, and some pretty beefy laptops doing all sorts of video editing and filming and animation work in blender and such that they have been learning on their own as "passion projects", there are also a bunch building small RPG based games and such using online Python classes. I have grade 6's asking me for the UE4 dev kits and sources for learning C++. We recently (2020) got a bunch of Lenovo Daydreams that are paired with the Samsung galaxy tab's and they are using that to animate AR/VR content. They are actually doing some pretty cool stuff with it, I'm a smidge jealous because it looks fun but I just don't have the time.
 
DukenukemX said:
I wonder if that's the reason Apple decided to limit their new macOS Monterey Features from Intel Macs?
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The analysis isn't differentiating sales based on operating system, so PC in this sense includes Apple products and Chromebooks all together with Windows machines.

If anything Apple is just EOLing features from their legacy hardware in order to encourage movement to the new stuff without compromising core features.

What this does explain is why Apple sold all those TSMC wafers to AMD earlier this year.
 
Axman said:
The analysis isn't differentiating sales based on operating system, so PC in this sense includes Apple products and Chromebooks all together with Windows machines.

If anything Apple is just EOLing features from their legacy hardware in order to encourage movement to the new stuff without compromising core features.

What this does explain is why Apple sold all those TSMC wafers to AMD earlier this year.
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Pretty sure Apple just sold up some of their 7nm time, they were having issues for a while sourcing components for some of their cheaper model parts still using the 7nm chips. So they cut their processor orders to match and directed the spared resources to their newer 5nm parts and push those harder instead. Made up the difference selling that 7nm fab time to AMD at a premium.
 
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" low-cost Chromebooks were the most popular item as people looking to refresh their devices, especially for education purposes,"

They are going to be in for a surprise, my kids school software won't run on Chromebooks.
 
[Spectre] said:
" low-cost Chromebooks were the most popular item as people looking to refresh their devices, especially for education purposes,"

They are going to be in for a surprise, my kids school software won't run on Chromebooks.
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I'm curious to know what software that is, I'm yet to really find a software suite that can't be made to run on the Chromebooks in some form or another.
 
[Spectre] said:
Brightspace with Respondus.
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Brightspace has an extension and Respondus works with the Lockdown browser so between the two of them they should work. We don't use either of those platforms here in the district so I can't say 100% but both services have a help section especially for ChromeOS users.
 
Lakados said:
Yes and no, I have kids in grade 4 classrooms rocking iPad pro's, macBook pro's, and some pretty beefy laptops doing all sorts of video editing and filming and animation work in blender and such that they have been learning on their own as "passion projects", there are also a bunch building small RPG based games and such using online Python classes. I have grade 6's asking me for the UE4 dev kits and sources for learning C++. We recently (2020) got a bunch of Lenovo Daydreams that are paired with the Samsung galaxy tab's and they are using that to animate AR/VR content. They are actually doing some pretty cool stuff with it, I'm a smidge jealous because it looks fun but I just don't have the time.
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You could do that on a chromebook or thin client and a powerful build/render server. It's easy to argue they're necessary if you ignore the alternative.

Now, if they can afford it, I'm not going to say "don't!" just because there is a cheaper alternative. But there are alternative ways to achieve that which can work almost as well (or better if they're done right).
 
Lakados said:
Brightspace has an extension and Respondus works with the Lockdown browser so between the two of them they should work. We don't use either of those platforms here in the district so I can't say 100% but both services have a help section especially for ChromeOS users.
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If you go through their support you will notice that it does not function. Even the Beta version which has just come out lacks a huge subset of functions that are necessary.
 
[Spectre] said:
If you go through their support you will notice that it does not function. Even the Beta version which has just come out lacks a huge subset of functions that are necessary.
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That's just straight-up bad of those two platforms then, but yeah that puts your kid in a tough spot. But I would assume that if the school using those platforms moves forward on a chromeOS infrastructure they would have a solution in place somehow, even if that is just giving RDP access to a pre-configured instance for Tests. But yeah there are certainly a lot of things that don't work directly on the Chromebooks. But as somebody who does IT for school districts I can say straight up that Principals and Administrators move in directions then tell IT about it after the fact when agreements are signed and money is spent and they basically look at us hand us some random shit with an email of a PDF to the instructions and say "Make it work!"
 
Lakados said:
That's just straight-up bad of those two platforms then, but yeah that puts your kid in a tough spot. But I would assume that if the school using those platforms moves forward on a chromeOS infrastructure they would have a solution in place somehow, even if that is just giving RDP access to a pre-configured instance for Tests. But yeah there are certainly a lot of things that don't work directly on the Chromebooks. But as somebody who does IT for school districts I can say straight up that Principals and Administrators move in directions then tell IT about it after the fact when agreements are signed and money is spent and they basically look at us hand us some random shit with an email of a PDF to the instructions and say "Make it work!"
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They don't really care since they are all going back in person 100% in the fall.
 
[Spectre] said:
They don't really care since they are all going back in person 100% in the fall.
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That's fair, we've always had lots of remote students. We are small and very out of the way with lots of farms in the area so honestly, they mostly keep the kids home they work the farms during the day and do their schooling remotely in the evenings more than not. So we have always had a significant portion of remote-only students for my entire time here, so all we had to do for the pandemic so far was continue doing that just bigger... It was pretty smooth and the Chromebooks made that really easy for us but we've spent some 4 years getting our systems lined up so they can work from there pretty seamlessly, we're expecting that even after we go back to "normal" we are still going to have 2-3x more students who choose to stay in the DL remote learning courses than in person.
 
HP is the only good laptop with a newer ryzen 5000U series and the convertible / x360 design.. Last I checked anyways which was a couple months ago.

Dell had a much pricier ryzen 4000U laptop
 
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