Windows PCs Prioritized Over Chromebooks in Components Shortage (arstechnica.com) 42
In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.
unsurprising (Score:1)
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I know schools seem to love them as they are cheap and easy to lockdown.
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Ok..WTF, there is a "worldwide PC Device tracker" out there somewhere?
What and how exactly is this and how does it track computing devices????
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Sales channels reports, personnel interviews, earnings reports of relevant companies, etc.
Data collation of this kind for all major industries is a big business.
Not anti-chromebook bias, simple margins. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a few rare scarce hard to find chips. You can either make a Chevy or a Cadillac. Which one would you make? Tesla is doing the same thing. Production constrained. So keep selling the highest margin product the market is willing to buy.
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Most Chromebook makers are also PC makers so they should have the same supplier contacts.
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Exactly. More than likely they use identical components, even.
The only difference is branding and whether Microsoft or Google have certified the hardware as Chrome OS/Windows 11 compatible.
Re: Not anti-chromebook bias, simple margins. (Score:3)
Chrome books are made by PC mfg... There is no major company that exclusively makes only chromebooks.
Re:Not anti-chromebook bias, simple margins. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course. If I have only enough chips to build product A or product B, I'm going to build the one that makes me the most profit.
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Another thing is well, simple sales over margin.
If you can make 1000 PCs or 1000 Chromebooks, but you know those 1000 PCs will sell out in a month, while those 1000 Chromebooks might take two months to sell through, even though you might make less money on each PC than Chromebook, you might make 1000 PCs because they will sell quicker - you get your money quicker, you get your profit sooner.
And retailers prefer fast moving products because product on shelves cost money (warehousing, shelf space, locked in m
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Not anti-chromebook bias...
It's ok, really, to go ahead and show anti-chromebook bias. They are utterly useless devices. It's not a matter of margins, but actually a matter of good public policy. When facing a chip shortage, use available resources to make devices that have the widest possible use. Chromebooks are not those devices.
its because (Score:2)
People rally against Microsoft for its traps, but the PC platform has always been the users, development tools have always been the users, software distribution has always been the users.
Unlike Windows on PC, with Microsoft sitting at one end of the ecosystem there, there is Chrome on Chromebook with Google completely surround
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The one value I've seen for a chromebook is a cheap internet only PC. Since you can log in as guest, it manages this pretty well.
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Cheap Linux portable as well. Granted, it's been a couple years since I loaded a new one with Linux, but for web development and writing it's cheap and gets the job done plenty fine.
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I've still got my old Acer C720.
Bought it in 2013... it went out of support finally (in 2020 IIRC). But there's a BIOS flash available and now it's running full-on unsandboxed Fedora with LXDE and Firefox. Still surfs the internet great, although maybe not quite as Google intended :).
The battery life is still a couple hours, too.
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They're pretty awesome for K-12 students. Where most of the homework has to be done through a web portal anyways. And while you can ruggedize a laptop, eventually students are going to ruin them or lose them. My cousin's kid left her backpack in the bed of his pickup on a 1000mi+ road trip. Yeah, backpack was gone at the destination. Either it blew away or someone took it at any number of stops.
Schools (Score:3, Informative)
Chromebooks are popular with schools, as they don't want students installing random stuff on them. They want a walled garden they can issue to students.
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DOS/Windows was always a closed platform, which ran atop an open platform. Because software was seen as a small piece of the puzzle and because the competitors at the time were less open (ie the hardware was generally proprietary too) it was seen as more open than the competition.
People rally against MS because they can't be avoided, chromebooks don't have the market share to do that. Even if you have intentionally bought a mac or installed linux, it's often impossible to avoid ms entirely - someone will se
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"DOS/Windows was always a closed platform" ... there were also different "development platforms" over Windows (or DOS).
You could make and distribute software for Windows using nothing from Microsoft (well, except the Windows PCs used to build and test the products).
There were compilers from multiple companies (Borland, Watcom), and - due to the limited operating system support for things like audio, video, networking,
Basically, you could build - for example - a game to run on Windows but not use any Microso
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You could always develop software for macos without needing anything from apple either, despite the mac being a closed platform including both the os and hardware.
Compared to unix, or especially linux/bsd windows is a closed system running on open hardware, hence why it was preferred over a closed system running on closed hardware - which was most of the competition at the time.
Compared to iOS it's relatively open in that you're free to build whatever you want to run on top of the os, and to run the os on a
What is more egregarious (Score:2, Offtopic)
is why we should have to buy computers at all. For anyone operating a web browser or office software, the hardware 10 years ago could provide the same function to do the same job. What has changed? Software bloat, instead of optimizing software, time is spent on coming up with new features, or new versions of software for only one purpose, to make money. The consumers and the environment will suffer.
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They don't make them to last 10 years. They want you to buy a new one from them every 5 or so. With some babysitting they can be repaired or maintained beyond 5, but most don't want the hassle of repeat repair shop visits.
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I dunno. My daughter ran on an 10-year-old homebrew PC, that still gets current Win 10 updates, and the only problem it has is it should have an SSD in it by now, which is available. She left for college and I'm finally going to retire it. I got 10 years out of it.
So, lacking an SSD, it boots like a dog, but once it's running it works fine. OEM parts. Same stuff that was in it when I built it, including the WD Black HD. I could put it next to my TV and run a current browser and office software easy. The fro
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This is a reasonable point. My experience matches yours.
A good PC can remain performant for a long time if it has sufficient RAM and well performing storage. Most "slow" system complaints that persist after a clean OS reinstall are burning a lot of time swapping to disk or dealing with failing storage that has terrible read and seek times.
It's harder for laptops that move a lot because they face more physical damage.
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Just an anecdote here...
My HP Compaq Elite 8300 (i3 3210 I think), bought second hand 4+ years ago is about 10 years old now and working perfectly. It has "new" memory (2x4GB) instead of the "old" 1x4GB, but the old RAM still works. HDD is ok, DVD-RW is ok, I dusted the CPU cooler a couple of times.
My wife also has an iMac Mid 2011 (I think) and a MacBook of similar age. They work too, but the iMac had to be vacuumed and the temperature sensor failed 10 times or so (had to shut off the iMac completely, incl
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A 10 year old laptop probably isnt working very well today even with a fresh install of greatest-os-you-want. The screen isnt as bright. Some of the keys are sketchy. The battery life is atrocious. The ancient bluetooth in the laptop sometimes might work, poorly, with a device you can buy today, etc.
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Most of my hardware upgrades are from software, not because something broke. If something breaks I usually replace it with a component that broke.
Well duh. Higher ASP, Higher Margin wins... (Score:2)
why would anybody be surprised?
Not seeing it (Score:2)
If PCs are being prioritized over Chromebooks, I'm not seeing it. I have orders from early last year which still haven't been delivered. And not only not delivered, not even produced. All we see is the order has been accepted.
Considering the hundreds of machines we're still waiting on, I'd like to know who is getting these so-called shipments. On top of which, if things aren't being shipped then the manufacturer isn't getting paid. Has anyone checked to see how companies such as HP are manipulating the
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Why does product sales margin matter? (Score:2)
I don't see what higher margins in end product sales have to do with it? That's what TFA says. I thought it was just TFS, but no, it says that in TFA too.
The supplier gets what's in the contract regardless of how much mark-up the vendor chooses for their product.
The Windows PCs have higher margin parts in them in the first place. That is: a higher standard of hardware. Then it makes perfect sense. The high margin is for the fabricators, who will honor their contracts for higher quality parts before the lowe
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It isnt just the component makers that do this. You are making and shipping chromebooks to retailers. You put each through some sort of QA process. Some you know for sure got a problem with them but you think its still sellable. Guess where the sketchy shit goes? Walmart is the lowest bidding retailer. They are, in fact, notoriously stingy with their suppliers.
For some kinds of things it either works o
Windows laptops are better for Linux (Score:1)
That's better for the Linux community. "Windows" laptops tend to have better spec's than a Chromebook, and it's much easier (And less constrained by the hardware limitations) to install Linux on them.