2020 Was the Best Year Ever for Chromebook
- Paul Thurrott
- Jan 30, 2021
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Researchers from Canalys claim that hardware makers sold 30.7 million Chromebooks in 2020, the platform’s best year ever. So, Google’s productivity platform accounted for over 10 percent of all personal computers sold last year.
“Demand for Chromebooks is through the roof,” Canalys research director Rushabh Doshi said in a prepared statement. “With many countries being forced to accelerate their digital education plans in the wake of additional lockdowns, schools and universities are clamoring for easy to deploy solutions and Google’s digital offerings for education are proving quite popular over rival platforms, especially in the US and Western Europe.”
According to Canalys, hardware makers sold a record 11.2 million Chromebooks in Q4 2020, the best-ever quarter for the platform, and over 4 times the sales recorded in the year-ago quarter. And they sold 30.7 million Chromebooks in all of 2020. Canalys puts the total size of the PC market in 2020 at 297 million units sold, and I arrived at a very similar figure, 288.9 million units, by averaging data from Gartner and IDC. But either way, Chromebooks accounted for over 10 percent of all personal computers sold in 2020.
HP was the top seller of Chromebooks with 3.5 million units sold in the fourth quarter, Canalys says, and sales were up 235 percent year-over-year (YOY). Lenovo was in second place with 2.8 million units sold and 1766 percent (!) growth. Acer and Dell both shipped about 1.5 million units. And Samsung landed in fifth place with just over one million units sold, up 630 percent.
Canalys says that demand for Chromebooks “is expected to remain strong through 2021.” Helping matters, the firm also claims that the platform has seen rising interest from outside of the education market, including consumers and traditional commercial customers that are “seeking out Chromebooks to ensure affordable continuity of business or personal computing.”
Canalys also noted that the tablet market experienced big growth in 2020 as well, with sales hitting an all-time high of 52.8 million units in the fourth quarter and 160.6 million units in all of 2020; that latter figure is 28 percent higher than in 2019. Apple sold almost 20 million of those tablets, the best performance for iPad since 2014. (Interesting that this almost exactly mirrors the PC growth experience in 2020, where sales were higher than any year since 2015.) Samsung (9.9 million units), Amazon (6.5 million), Lenovo (5.6 million), and Huawei (3.5 million) round out the top five.
Conversation 28 comments
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b6gd
<blockquote><em><a href="#611137">In reply to reefer2:</a></em></blockquote><p>I agree and I think that there will be a lot of Chromebooks in that scrap pile as well.</p>
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b6gd
<blockquote><em><a href="#611017">In reply to MikeGalos:</a></em></blockquote><p>If the Pandemic starts to fade with the vaccine distribution and just burning out to an extent, I bet Q2 to some extent and really starting with Q3 we will see a massive drop off in computer sales. Perhaps even lower than in pre-pandemic quarters.</p>
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b6gd
<blockquote><em><a href="#611053">In reply to CajunMoses:</a></em></blockquote><p>Lol. ChromeOS is easy to setup, update and reset, because it's a just a browser. The same thing happens with Chrome on Windows and Mac, same for Edge and they even will re-open tabs that you had open after the update.</p><p><br></p><p>Being just a browser comes with many limitations as well. There is plenty of software that I use that just can't run on ChromeOS. In some cases there are web based alternatives but so far they have been inferior. </p><p><br></p><p>Then there is the "scary" factor. Almost everyone I know is running, not walking, away from anything Google if they can. Governments around the world are rightfully concerned about Google, its business practices and its stance on privacy. Apple hammers home the privacy aspect of its products and rightfully so and when iOS starts telling people to their face what Google products are collecting you will see more migration away from Google options.</p><p><br></p><p>Anyone I know that has to use a Chromebook does not like it. The rise of Chromebooks sales was a direct result of the pandemic and people needed anything and Chromebooks were better than nothing.</p><p><br></p><p>I bet all computer sales will go down after the pandemic is over. 2022 probably will not be a banner year for computer sales.</p>
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<blockquote><em><a href="#611296">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><p>That can run lots of software that Chrome OS can't. </p><p><br></p><p> I use have used Visio on Windows, MS Office, Quicken, Affinity Photo, etc. When I moved to the Mac, most of that was available, and for Visio I use OmniGraffle Pro. There are no web based alternatives for those apps that I like as much as the apps.</p><p><br></p><p>I also can run Chrome (no thanks) or FireFox, or my favorite the new Edge.</p>